Disorder-specific characteristics of borderline personality disorder with co-occurring depression and its comparison with major depression: An fMRI study with emotional interference task

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) are both associated with abnormalities in the regulation of emotion, with BPD being highly comorbid with MDD. Disorder-specific dysfunctions in BPD, however, have hardly been addressed, hence the lack of knowledge pertaining to the specificity of emotion processing deficits and their commonality with MDD. 24 healthy comparison subjects, 21 patients with MDD, and 13 patients with comorbid BPD and MDD (BPD + MDD group) were studied using functional MRI. The subjects were required to perform an emotional interference task that entailed categorizing facial affect while ignoring words that labeled the emotional contents of the external stimuli. Collapsing across emotional face types, we observed that participants with BPD + MDD uniquely displayed a greater involvement of the visual areas and the cerebellum. During emotional conflict processing, on the other hand, the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) appeared to be affected in both patient groups. In comparison to the HC, the MDD group showed differences also in the posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) and the inferior parietal lobule (IPL). Thus, our data indicate dysfunctionality in the neural circuitry responsible for emotional conflict control in both disorders. The enhanced visual cortex activation in BPD + MDD suggests the visual system's hyperresponsiveness to faces at an early perceptual level. Not being associated with co-occurring depression, this effect in BPD + MDD appears to represent specific personality traits such as disturbed reactivity toward emotionally expressive facial stimuli.