Attentional mechanisms of borderline personality disorder. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • We consider whether disruption of a specific neural circuit related to self-regulation is an underlying biological deficit in borderline personality disorder (BPD). Because patients with BPD exhibit a poor ability to regulate negative affect, we hypothesized that brain mechanisms thought to be involved in such self-regulation would function abnormally even in situations that seem remote from the symptoms exhibited by these patients. To test this idea, we compared the efficiency of attentional networks in BPD patients with controls who were matched to the patients in having very low self-reported effortful control and very high negative emotionality and controls who were average in these two temperamental dimensions. We found that the patients exhibited significantly greater difficulty in their ability to resolve conflict among stimulus dimensions in a purely cognitive task than did average controls but displayed no deficit in overall reaction time, errors, or other attentional networks. The temperamentally matched group did not differ significantly from either group. A significant correlation was found between measures of the ability to control conflict in the reaction-time task and self-reported effortful control.

publication date

  • November 27, 2002

Research

keywords

  • Attention
  • Borderline Personality Disorder
  • Psychological Tests

Identity

PubMed Central ID

  • PMC138617

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 0037059023

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1073/pnas.252644699

PubMed ID

  • 12456876

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 99

issue

  • 25