Emotion Perception in Borderline Personality Disorder

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a serious mental illness characterized by emotion dysregulation. Symptoms related to emotion are thought to contribute to difficulties in perceiving emotional expressions. Individuals with BPD and demographically matched healthy controls completed a task assessing the recognition of happy, sad, and neutral facial expressions at two intensities. Patients with BPD demonstrated comparable performance on the recognition of very happy and very sad facial expression but were significantly less accurate on neutral expressions. Patients with BPD were also significantly worse in recognizing mildly happy facial expressions, however the severity of current depressive symptoms intervened this relationship. There was evidence that perceptual biases within BPD are unique from mood-congruent biases typically found in major depressive disorder. The findings advance research on the topic of emotion perception in BPD and suggest important new lines of investigation that may be useful for delineating the nature of emotion dysregulation in BPD.