Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a serious mental disorder that often persists in adulthood. In a pilot study, a structured skills training group program for adult ADHD led to significant symptomatic improvements. The present study evaluated the program's effectiveness, feasibility, and patient acceptability in a multicenter setting. Seventy-two adult ADHD patients were assigned to 13 two-hour weekly sessions at 4 different therapy sites. The therapy was well tolerated and led to significant improvements of ADHD, depressive symptoms, and personal health status (p < 0.001). The factors treatment site and medication did not contribute to the overall improvement. Patients regarded the program topics "behavioral analyses," "mindfulness," and "emotion regulation" as the most helpful. In this multicenter study, the therapy program showed therapist-independent effects and seemed to be disorder-specific. This warrants the effort of organizing further controlled studies.

Emotional dysregulation is hypothesized to be a core feature of borderline personality disorder (BPD). In this study, we investigated the course of emotions in response to standardized emotion inductions in BPD. A total of 26 female BPD patients, 28 matched healthy control subjects, and 15 female patients with major depressive disorder listened to short stories inducing an angry, joyful, or neutral mood. Before and immediately after each story as well as 3 and 6 minutes later, participants rated their current anger, joy, anxiety, shame, and sadness. All 3 groups showed the same increase and decrease of emotions. However, strong group differences in the general level of all negative emotions occurred. While sadness was stronger both in BPD and major depressive disorder as compared with healthy controls, all other negative emotions were significantly increased in BPD only independent of comorbid depression. Extreme negative affectivity may be a more appropriate description of BPD-related emotional problems than emotional hyperreactivity.

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