TY - JOUR
T1 - Interpersonal trauma Dissociates borderline from other personality disorders in social orienting
AU - van Heusden, Corine
AU - Montagne, Barbara
AU - van Honk, Jack
AU - Terburg, David
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The Authors
PY - 2024/9
Y1 - 2024/9
N2 - Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), particularly with comorbid trauma-disorders, show an attentional bias towards angry facial expressions. This is often interpreted to reflect increased anxiety and sensitivity to social threats. Given BPDs severe problems in reacting to and interpreting social communication, we investigated whether this threat bias extends to social orienting. Using a gaze-cueing task, we assessed whether centrally presented dynamic fearful and happy gaze stimuli promote the detection of peripherally presented targets. Groups with BPD (N = 50) and other personality disorders (OPD, N = 51) were compared to healthy controls (HC, N = 46), and evaluated on the independent influence of traumatic experience, trait anxiety and trait anger. Across groups we find reliable gaze-cueing. In line with earlier evidence, trait anxiety predicts faster detection of targets signaled by a fearful gaze in HCs. This threat bias is however not present in BPDs and OPDs, thus the threat bias in BPD does not extend to social orienting. Instead, self-experienced trauma predicts amplified gaze-cueing in BPDs, but reduced gaze-cueing in OPDs. This not only emphasizes the importance of evaluating trauma exposure in personality disorders, but also suggests that the childhood adversity typically associated with the development of BPD promotes increased social orienting.
AB - Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), particularly with comorbid trauma-disorders, show an attentional bias towards angry facial expressions. This is often interpreted to reflect increased anxiety and sensitivity to social threats. Given BPDs severe problems in reacting to and interpreting social communication, we investigated whether this threat bias extends to social orienting. Using a gaze-cueing task, we assessed whether centrally presented dynamic fearful and happy gaze stimuli promote the detection of peripherally presented targets. Groups with BPD (N = 50) and other personality disorders (OPD, N = 51) were compared to healthy controls (HC, N = 46), and evaluated on the independent influence of traumatic experience, trait anxiety and trait anger. Across groups we find reliable gaze-cueing. In line with earlier evidence, trait anxiety predicts faster detection of targets signaled by a fearful gaze in HCs. This threat bias is however not present in BPDs and OPDs, thus the threat bias in BPD does not extend to social orienting. Instead, self-experienced trauma predicts amplified gaze-cueing in BPDs, but reduced gaze-cueing in OPDs. This not only emphasizes the importance of evaluating trauma exposure in personality disorders, but also suggests that the childhood adversity typically associated with the development of BPD promotes increased social orienting.
KW - Anger
KW - Anxiety
KW - Borderline personality disorder
KW - Emotion regulation
KW - Gaze-cueing
KW - Social threat
KW - Trauma
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85202543678&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.psycom.2024.100189
DO - 10.1016/j.psycom.2024.100189
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85202543678
SN - 2772-5987
VL - 4
JO - Psychiatry Research Communications
JF - Psychiatry Research Communications
IS - 3
M1 - 100189
ER -