Reduced Sensitivity to Emotional Facial Expressions in Borderline Personality Disorder: Effects of Emotional Valence and Intensity

Abstract

A heightened sensitivity towards negative emotional stimuli has been described for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). We investigated whether a faster and more accurate detection of negatively valent information in BPD can be confirmed by means of a visual search task which required subjects to detect a face with an incongruent emotional expression within a crowd of neutral faces. Twenty eight BPD patients and 28 nonpatients were asked to indicate whether a set of schematic neutral faces (3 × 3, 4 × 4 matrices) contained a happy or an angry face. Besides valence, the intensity of the target's emotion was varied in two steps. BPD patients and nonpatients both demonstrated an anger-superiority effect. However, no higher sensitivity towards negative stimuli was observed in BPD compared to nonpatients. BPD patients seem to rely to a stronger extent on controlled, i.e., serial, attention demanding processes when searching more subtle social-emotional information with positive valence.