Emotions at the border: Increased punishment behavior during fair interpersonal exchanges in borderline personality disorder.

Abstract

This study evaluated whether the impairment in cooperation that characterizes individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) can be explained by the difficulty to use emotion regulation strategies and to accurately perceive the fairness of others' behavior. Forty-one patients with BPD and 41 sex and age matched healthy controls (HC) played the responder's role in a Modified Ultimatum Game during which they were asked to apply 3 different emotion regulation strategies: look, distancing, and reappraisal. Offer rejection rates were used as an index of punishment behavior. After the experiment, participants also rated the degree of perceived equity of the offers after receiving fair and unfair offers. Reappraisal was effective in decreasing punishment behaviors for unfair offers in both the BPD and HC groups. By contrast, BPD patients displayed a different behavior than HC when making decisions upon fair offers, independently from the regulation strategies adopted. In fact, they rejected higher rates of fair offers than HC. Further, BPD patients judged fair offers as less fair than HC. This indicates an altered judgment and decision making on fair interpersonal exchanges. In conclusion, BPD patients exhibit increased punishment behavior during fair, "favorable" social exchanges, which they tend to perceive as less fair than controls. Thus, BPD patients may be biased toward underestimating positive feedback from others.

The paradoxical decline and growth of trust as a function of borderline personality disorder trait count: Using discontinuous growth modelling to examine trust dynamics in response to violation and repair

“…Our results also support previous research in which individuals with BPD have been found to demonstrate greater acceptance of and perhaps a preference for inequitable treatment. For instance, findings from economic game studies suggest that compared to HC's, BPD individuals are more likely to accept unfair offers [65] and reject fair offers [66], and express a greater preference for an unfair interaction partner, and lower preference for a fair interaction partner [67]. While much of the trust literature in borderline populations has focused on BPD tendencies towards mistrust and lack of cooperation, our analytical methodology has highlighted the other extreme, the tendency to engage in trusting behaviour in contexts warranting prudence.…”

Anxiety Regulation: From Affective Neuroscience to Clinical Practice

“…In this paragraph, we explore the dynamics behind anxiety regulation, dysregulation, and their neural bases. One powerful way to characterize psychological disorders is to understand how individuals regulate or fail to regulate anxiety and other affective reactions [ 2 , 3 , 4 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 ]. The concept of emotion regulation includes the neurocognitive process by which individuals manipulate the strength (intensity), onset, and manifestation of their emotions [ 27 ].…”

A Dual Route Model for Regulating Emotions: Comparing Models, Techniques and Biological Mechanisms

“…Although emotion regulation was initially intended as a field of basic research, clinicians quickly understood its relevance for their practice. Studying the mechanisms involved in the regulation of emotions is particularly relevant when considering the failure to regulate interpersonal emotions and emotionally driven behaviors that characterize psychiatric disorders (Kring and Werner, 2004;Ochsner and Gross, 2008;Grecucci, 2012;Giorgetta et al, 2012Giorgetta et al, , 2014Grecucci et al, 2015bGrecucci et al, , 2019Messina et al, 2016;De Panfilis et al, 2019;Sorella et al, 2019). Nearly all psychiatric disorders include one or more primary dysregulated emotions (e.g., anger in borderline personality disorder, sadness in depression, fear in anxiety disorders, shame in narcissistic personality disorders, etc.…”