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Attentional mechanisms of borderline personality disorder

Attentional mechanisms of borderline personality disorder. Posner et al. (2002). Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD):. Emotional disregulation Black and white thinking Instability of mood and behaviour E.g. inappropriate and intense anger

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Attentional mechanisms of borderline personality disorder

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  1. Attentional mechanisms of borderlinepersonality disorder Posner et al. (2002)

  2. BorderlinePersonality Disorder (BPD): • Emotional disregulation • Black and white thinking • Instability of mood and behaviour • E.g. inappropriate and intense anger • Difficulty integrating self-image and interpersonal relationships • Co-Morbidity with Bi-Polar, depression, anxiety disorders, ADD, eating disorders.

  3. This Study: • Possible to relate higher order cognitive functions to brain systems. (Kandel; 1998, 1999) • Patients with BPD => high negative affect and low effortful control • These reflect the DSM-IV criteria of chronic emptiness and poor control of moods and emotions. • If this is the case, do BPD patients show impairment on tasks using systems implied in emotional control and attention? • What can this tell us about the aetiology of BPD

  4. Method (1): • 3 subject groups assessed for effortful control (EC) & negative affect (NA): • 39 BPD patients • 22 temperament matched controls (ATQ assessed) • 30 controls (average temperament) • Compared performance on RT task: ANT-assesses efficiency of 3 attentional control networks (Fan et al., 2002) • Alerting • Orienting • Conflict resolution

  5. Method(2): ANT

  6. Results(1): • Sig. effects of cue and target, but no between group differences in overall mean RT. • No between group diff. in alerting / orienting scores. • Sig. effect of group membership on Conflict res. Scores. => BPD differed from normal controls BUT not matched controls =>Why?

  7. Results (2): • Correlated conflict res. scores with effortful control (EC) measures (ATQ): • Sig. negative correlation: r = -.29 (p<0.01) • i.e. the lower a Ss EC, the slower their RT in incongruent target condition. • EC showed negative correlation with Negative Affect (NA): r = -.68 • i.e. the higher a Ss NA the lower their EC

  8. Conclusions(1): • BPD Ss =>Impairment in attentional network involved in conflict resolution (i.e.cognitve control) • Found in purely cog. Task; no emotional aspect. =>links BPD to neural mechanisms. • This impairment only present in patients =>EC temperament may be a risk factor for BPD but not the whole story. • BPD patients often present with backgrounds of abuse =>EC temp. combined with aspects of socialisation combine to produce BPD. • OR: social factors => inappropriate development of attentional systems.

  9. Conclusions(2): Causes of BDP? • Attentional deficit tells us about anatomy of BPD impairments. • Links between network & EC. • Links between development, network, & BPD. • Link between EC, empathy & BPD characteristics.

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