An eye-tracking study of interpersonal threat sensitivity and adverse childhood experiences in borderline personality disorder

Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation

Sabrina Boll¹  Sabine C. Herpertz¹  Corinne Neukel¹  Marlene Krauch¹  Karen Hillmann¹  Katja I. Seitz¹  Kai Ueltzhoeffer¹  Johanna Leitenstorfer¹  Katja Bertsch²  Nikolaus Kleindienst³ 

[1] Department of General Psychiatry, Center for Psychosocial Medicine, Medical Faculty, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany;Department of General Psychiatry, Center for Psychosocial Medicine, Medical Faculty, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany;Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Munich, Germany;Institute for Psychiatric and Psychosomatic Psychotherapy, Central Institute of Mental Health, Medical Faculty Mannheim, Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany;

关键词: Adverse childhood experiences;    Borderline personality disorder;    Childhood maltreatment;    Eye-tracking;    Emotion dysregulation;    Facial affect recognition;    Interpersonal functioning;    Threat hypersensitivity;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s40479-020-00141-7

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundPrevious eye-tracking studies provide preliminary evidence for a hypersensitivity to negative, potentially threatening interpersonal cues in borderline personality disorder (BPD). From an etiological point of view, such interpersonal threat hypersensitivity might be explained by a biological vulnerability along with a history of early life adversities. The objective of the current study was to investigate interpersonal threat hypersensitivity and its association with adverse childhood experiences (ACE) in patients with BPD employing eye-tracking technology.MethodsWe examined a sample of 46 unmedicated, adult female patients with BPD and 25 healthy female volunteers, matched on age and intelligence, with a well-established emotion classification paradigm with angry, fearful, happy, and neutral facial expressions. ACE were assessed retrospectively with the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire.ResultsPatients as compared to healthy volunteers reflexively directed their gaze more quickly towards the eyes of emotional and neutral faces and did not adapt their fixation patterns according to the facial expression presented. Misclassifying emotional and neutral faces as angry correlated positively with the patients’ self-reported ACE.ConclusionsBuilding on and extending earlier findings, our results are likely to suggest a visual hypervigilance towards the eyes of emotional and neutral facial expressions and a childhood trauma-related anger bias in patients with BPD. Given the lack of a clinical control group, the question whether these findings are specific for BPD has to remain open. Thus, further research is needed to elucidate the specificity of altered visual attention allocation and the role of ACE in anger recognition in patients with BPD.

【 授权许可】

CC BY