A negative relationship between ventral striatal loss anticipation response and impulsivity in borderline personality disorder

Abstract

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) frequently exhibit impulsive behavior, and self-reported impulsivity is typically higher in BPD patients when compared to healthy controls. Previous functional neuroimaging studies have suggested a link between impulsivity, the ventral striatal response to reward anticipation, and prediction errors. Here we investigated the striatal neural response to monetary gain and loss anticipation and their relationship with impulsivity in 21 female BPD patients and 23 age-matched female healthy controls using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants performed a delayed monetary incentive task in which three categories of objects predicted a potential gain, loss, or neutral outcome. Impulsivity was assessed using the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS-11). Compared to healthy controls, BPD patients exhibited significantly reduced fMRI responses of the ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens (VS/NAcc) to both reward-predicting and loss-predicting cues. BIS-11 scores showed a significant positive correlation with the VS/NAcc reward anticipation responses in healthy controls, and this correlation, while also nominally positive, failed to reach significance in BPD patients. BPD patients, on the other hand, exhibited a significantly negative correlation between ventral striatal loss anticipation responses and BIS-11 scores, whereas this correlation was significantly positive in healthy controls. Our results suggest that patients with BPD show attenuated anticipation responses in the VS/NAcc and, furthermore, that higher impulsivity in BPD patients might be related to impaired prediction of aversive outcomes.

Gradual acquisition of visuospatial associative memory representations via the dorsal precuneus

“…Icons consisted of square images depicting color photographs of artificial ( N = 90) or natural ( N = 50) objects in front of a white background. The icons were selected from stimulus sets assembled for previously published studies (Barman et al, ; Handy et al, ; Herbort et al, ) and resized to 100 × 100 pixels. Thirty icons per category were selected for each participant and pseudorandomly assigned to the trials, resulting in each icon being presented in three to seven different trials.…”

Altered psychophysiological correlates of risk‐taking in borderline personality disorder

“…Since the FRN has been found to be involved in reinforcement learning (Walsh & Anderson, ), reduced FRN amplitudes seen in individuals with BPD may be associated with dysfunctional responses to affective stimuli and a reduced ability to learn from feedback. Altered affective processing in individuals with BPD is also reflected in attenuated signals to gains and losses in the ventral striatum (Herbort et al, ; Völlm et al, ). Thus, the propensity to show risk‐taking behavior may be related to the dysfunctional processing of affective information.…”

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“…It is worth mentioning though, that the investigators did not compare the performance of both BPD samples with healthy controls, thus any disorder-specific performance differences cannot be ascertained from this study. Impulsivity and its relation to the processing of aversive and pleasant stimuli in BPD, has been found to be mediated by the mesolimbic reward system, comprising the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens (Herbort et al, 2016). Rewarded tasks involving dopaminergic neurotransmission ostensibly activate both of the aforementioned regions, which are also believed to be crucial for both reward prediction and Bayesian prediction error (Schott et al, 2008).…”

“…According to the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), suspected sufferers of the condition must present with five or more symptoms including, but not limited to: identity disturbance, impulsivity, explosive episodes and suicidality, for the diagnostic criteria of BPD to be met. It is therefore considered to be an extremely heterogenous disorder as there are effectively over 100 permissible symptom combinations which would qualify for a clinical diagnosis (Herbort et al, 2016).…”

“…Moreover, studies using event-related measures such as fMRI have observed discrepant patterns of neural activation in the cognitive (Mensebach et al, 2009;Niedtfeld et al, 2017;O'Neill et al, 2015;Reitz et al, 2015) , behavioural (Herbort et al, 2016), social (Bungert et al, 2015;Domsalla et al, 2014;King-Casas et al, 2008) and affective processing (Bertsch et al, 2013;Hazlett et al, 2012;Lischke et al, 2017;Scherpiet et al, 2014) of BPD samples compared to healthy controls. However, it must be noted that the neurocircuitry of the disorderthough more PeerJ Preprints | https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27414v1 | CC BY 4.0 Open Access | rec: 5 Dec 2018, publ: 5 Dec 2018…”