Emotional lability and affective synchrony in borderline personality disorder.

Abstract

Extant research on emotional lability in borderline personality disorder (BPD) has focused almost exclusively on lability of individual emotions or emotion types, with limited research considering how different types of emotions shift together over time. Thus, this study examined the temporal dynamics of emotion in BPD at the level of both individual emotions (i.e., self-conscious emotions [SCE], anger, and anxiety) and mixed emotions (i.e., synchrony between emotions). One hundred forty-four women from the community completed a diagnostic interview and laboratory study involving five emotion induction tasks (each of which was preceded and followed by a 5-min resting period or neutral task). State ratings of SCE, anger, and anxiety were provided at 14 time points (before and after each laboratory task and resting period). Hierarchical linear modeling results indicate that women with BPD reported greater mean levels of SCE and Anxiety (but not Anger), and greater lability of Anxiety. Women with BPD also exhibited greater variability in lability of all three emotions (suggestive of within-group differences in the relevance of lability to BPD). Results also revealed synchrony (i.e., positive relations) between each possible pair of emotions, regardless of BPD status. Follow-up regression analyses suggest the importance of accounting for lability when examining the role of synchrony in BPD, as the relation of SCE-Anger synchrony to BPD symptom severity was moderated by Anger and SCE lability. Specifically, synchronous changes in SCE and Anger were associated with greater BPD symptom severity when large shifts in SCE were paired with minor shifts in Anger.

Frontal EEG asymmetry in borderline personality disorder is associated with alexithymia

“…A limitation of our study is that the participants’ current emotional state was not controlled for, which is known to influence frontal EEG asymmetry [ 5 ], and which may be specifically relevant for psychiatric conditions characterized by rapid mood swings such as BPD [ 30 ]. While the use of self-report measures is another considerable limitation of the present study, our findings suggest that FAS may potentially be utilized as a biomarker for psychopathological features such as alexithymia in BPD.…”

Suicide Ideation in Adolescents Following Inpatient Hospitalization: Examination of Intensity and Lability Over 6 Months

“…Within‐person suicidal lability was calculated using mean squared successive difference (Von Neumann, Kent, & Bellinson, ). This method has demonstrated validity as an index of lability in assessment of SI (Witte et al., ) as well as in assessment of affect (Ebner‐Priemer, Eid, Kleindienst, Stabenow, & Trull, ; Jahng, Wood, & Trull, ; Schoenleber et al., ). Initially, the difference in SI was calculated between each time point and the preceding one and the differences squared [i.e., ( X i − X i –1 ) 2 ], providing squared successive difference values for each time point beyond baseline.…”

Emotional lability and affective synchrony in posttraumatic stress disorder pathology

“…Affective synchrony refers to the extent to which changes in one emotional state tend to co-occur with changes in another emotional state (see Rafaeli, Rogers, & Revelle, 2007). Originally used to refer to pleasant-unpleasant emotion mixtures, recent studies have begun examining the co-occurrence of similarly valenced emotions (given the prominence of unpleasant emotional states in psychopathology; Schoenleber et al, 2016; Scott et al, 2015). To date, only one study has considered affective synchrony in PTSD.…”