Cognitive Emotion Regulation Strategies in Prisoners With Borderline Personality Disorder

Objective: The main aim of this study was to examine the cognitive emotion regulation strategies among prisoners with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and compare those with the normal population, by achieving the patterns of the implemented strategies between the BPD prisoners. Methods: Ninety prisoners with BPD and 92 non-clinical individuals participated in this study. A Structured Clinical Interview (SCID-II) was used to diagnosis of BPD, and the cognitive emotion regulation strategies were evaluated by the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ). The data were analyzed by independent t test and correlation coefficient via SPSS-16 software. Results: Independent t-test and correlations analyses showed that cognitive emotion regulation strategies differed in BPD as compared to normal samples, and also showed that self-blame, catastrophization, other blames and rumination strategies exhibited the largest associations with BPD (rs=0.40, 0.38, 0.34 and 0.33, respectively). Conclusion: The findings showed that the cognitive emotion regulation strategies, especially maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies, had significant relation with BPD symptoms. So, these maladaptive cognitive-emotional components may, therefore, play an essential role in the interventional strategies.