Emotion Processing in Borderline Personality Disorder: The Myth of Enhanced Detection of Angry Faces

The text discusses a series of studies that aim to investigate the ability of individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) to detect angry faces. The studies found that, contrary to previous beliefs, individuals with BPD do not show enhanced detection of angry faces compared to healthy controls. The experiments revealed no significant differences in the ability to detect angry faces between the two groups. These findings suggest that impairments in emotion processing in BPD may arise at later stages of evaluation and categorization of emotions rather than at the initial detection stage.

• The studies involved a laboratory experiment with a clinical sample and two web-based studies that measured Borderline features.
• Participants in all studies completed a visual search paradigm to measure reaction times for the detection of angry vs. happy faces.
• The results consistently spoke against enhanced detection of angry faces in the BPD groups, despite highly satisfactory statistical power to detect even small effects.