![]() ![]() No main effect of group was found, but BPD patients were selectively more sensitive towards angry stimuli, producing greater hitrates for angry faces than the HC group. After each trial, participants indicated whether an emotional face was present or not. Several trials included a happy or angry face, whereas others included only neutral looking faces. The first study by Schulze and colleagues used a rapid, continuous stream of stimuli consisting of facial photographs that were cropped into a standard oval shape. So far, only two studies have addressed emotion detection outside of morphing studies. To gain a better understanding of BPD patients’ emotion detection abilities it thus seems necessary to assess detection in paradigms that do not also include categorization. One potential problem with morphing studies is that they assess not only emotion detection but also an additional element of emotion categorization, because, once the morphing process is stopped, participants still have to label the displayed emotion. Evidently, clear conclusions regarding BPD patients’ emotion detection abilities are not possible based on this body of work. Finally, high BPD symptom counts predicted a lower detection threshold for angry male faces in a non-patient sample. Others found superior and still others found inferior emotion detection performance in the included BPD groups. Two studies found no difference regarding emotion detection between healthy controls (HC) and BPD patients or youth with BPD symptoms. ![]() Evidence on BPD patients’ performance in this task was mixed. The earliest stage in the morphing process at which participants perceive some degree of emotion in the face (and therefore stopped the morphing process) thus indicates their emotion detection abilities. Emotion detection has previously been captured using morphing paradigms in which an initially neutral face gradually changes into an emotional one. In contrast, emotion detection does not require specific emotions to be named and distinguished from one another it simply comprises the ability to accurately perceive whether any emotional content is present in a face or not. A meta-analysis on these studies revealed an emotion categorization deficit across all emotions and selective deficits for differentiating between disgust and anger. In previous studies on BPD samples, this ability was measured by asking participants to indicate which emotion they saw in a face by choosing the correct term from a set of pre-defined answering options. Emotion categorization requires the ability to correctly identify and verbally label a presented emotion. We argue that the studies summarized therein actually capture two distinct aspects of emotion recognition, namely emotion categorization and emotion detection, and present new evidence on the relatively under-researched aspect of emotion detection.Īccording to a recent series of experiments, emotion categorization and detection are distinct processes that require distinct abilities and should thus be discriminated from each other. Numerous studies on emotion recognition in BPD have been conducted and finally summarized in two comprehensive literature reviews as well as two recent meta-analyses. As a first step in the emotion processing continuum, the question of how well BPD patients can recognize emotions in others has gained particular interest in the past. Dysfunctional emotion processing is considered one of the central factors that contribute to the phenomenology of this disorder. ![]() Borderline Personality disorder (BPD) is a severe psychiatric disorder that affects around 1 to 3% of the adult population and is characterized by marked affective instability, impulsivity, and interpersonal problems. ![]()
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