Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) not only experience a strong instability in their affect and interpersonal relations but also disturbances in their self-experience, including dissociation and body-alienation symptoms. It is not yet understood whether an altered sense of ownership (SoO) or sense of agency (SoA) may contribute to these disturbances. One recent hypothesis is that patients with BPD have a reduced sense of self and are therefore more likely to misattribute external objects or actions to their own self than healthy individuals. The present study followed up this hypothesis by investigating whether BPD patients have a more flexible body representation than healthy participants. More specifically, the active rubber hand illusion (aRHI) was applied to 21 patients with BPD and the same number of healthy participants. Using established subjective, electrodermal, and behavioral measures, the participants' SoO and SoA were assessed during the aRHI. The findings show self-reported evidence for higher SoO under anatomical hand congruency as compared to anatomical incongruency, but no evidence for group differences between BPD patients and healthy participants. This finding is inconsistent with previous findings of an enhanced SoO-related body plasticity in BPD patients. Regarding SoA, the findings show self-report evidence of higher SoA in BPD patients versus healthy participants, although this group difference was not evident in the implicit SoA measure (intentional binding). In summary, the present study only reveals partial evidence for a higher body plasticity in BPD patients. Instead, the observed variability in results appears better explainable by some generally elevated perceptual suggestibility of BPD individuals.

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Background: People deceive online. There is, however, mixed evidence about whether people present themselves falsely on Facebook. We investigated to what extent people present their true selves on Facebook. As generally, people estimate their own behavior as ‘less evil’ than the behaviors of others, we also assessed people’s estimations of whether other people present their true selves on Facebook. Methods: In two studies (n=94, n=189), participants filled in a survey asking them to report how frequently and intensely they falsely present themselves on Facebook and in which ways. They were also asked to estimate this for other Facebook users. Results: The results showed that the majority of participants were not always honest on Facebook regarding their personality, unbeneficial information, and emotional state. A minority of participants provided false information in comments. We also obtained the ‘less deceptive than thou’ effect: Participants estimated that others more frequently and intensively engage in deception. Conclusion: The current research has led to new findings showing that the majority of the participants engage in deceptive self-presentational behavior and estimate others to be more deceptive than they are.

This technical paper provides a tutorial to build a low-cost (10-100 USD) and easy to assemble ECG device (ArdMob-ECG) that can be easily used for a variety of different scientific studies. The advantage of this device is that it automatically stores the data and has a built-in detection algorithm for heartbeats. Compared to a clinical ECG, this device entails a serial interface that can send triggers via USB directly to a computer and software (e.g. Unity, Matlab) with minimal delay due to its architecture. Its software and hardware is open-source and publicly available. The performance of the device regarding sensitivity and specificity is comparable to a professional clinical ECG and is assessed in this paper. Due to the open-source software, a variety of different research questions and individual alterations can be adapted using this ECG. The code as well as the circuit is publicly available and accessible for everyone to promote a better health system in remote areas, Open Science, and to boost scientific progress and the development of new paradigms that ultimately foster innovation.

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