Social judgement in borderline personality disorder

Nicol, Katie, Pope, Merrick, Sprengelmeyer, Reiner, Young, Andrew W. and Hall, Jeremy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2737-9009 2013. Social judgement in borderline personality disorder. PLoS ONE 8 (11) , e73440. 10.1371/journal.pone.0073440

Preview

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (219kB) | Preview

Abstract

Background Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a common and serious mental illness, associated with a high risk of suicide and self harm. Those with a diagnosis of BPD often display difficulties with social interaction and struggle to form and maintain interpersonal relationships. Here we investigated the ability of participants with BPD to make social inferences from faces. Method 20 participants with BPD and 21 healthy controls were shown a series of faces and asked to judge these according to one of six characteristics (age, distinctiveness, attractiveness, intelligence, approachability, trustworthiness). The number and direction of errors made (compared to population norms) were recorded for analysis. Results Participants with a diagnosis of BPD displayed significant impairments in making judgements from faces. In particular, the BPD Group judged faces as less approachable and less trustworthy than controls. Furthermore, within the BPD Group there was a correlation between scores on the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) and bias towards judging faces as unapproachable. Conclusion Individuals with a diagnosis of BPD have difficulty making appropriate social judgements about others from their faces. Judging more faces as unapproachable and untrustworthy indicates that this group may have a heightened sensitivity to perceiving potential threat, and this should be considered in clinical management and treatment.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics (CNGG) Medicine Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute (NMHRI)
Subjects:	R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Additional Information:	Copyright: © 2013 Nicol et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Publisher:	Public Library of Science
ISSN:	1932-6203
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Last Modified:	05 May 2023 11:23
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/76529

Citation Data

Cited 29 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item