Do Response Disinhibition and Interpersonal Vulnerability Contribute to Impulsive Behaviors in Individuals with Borderline Personality Features?
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Chen, Yu-Jie
Abstract
Individuals with borderline symptoms often display impulsive behaviors when encountering a real or imagined interpersonal threat. In current model, response disinhibition has been proposed as the mechanism underlying impulsive behaviors. In this study, it is hypothesized that strong emotional reactivity toward interpersonal events may cause decreased inhibitory control over responses in the individuals with borderline personality features and then contribute to the occurrence of impulsive acts.
To test the hypothesis, a modified stop-signal task was utilized to measure the capacity of response inhibition in different emotional states, which were induced by presentation of neutral words and words with high /low interpersonal relatedness. In study I, the characteristics of the words serving to emotion induction were rated in terms of valence, arousal and interpersonal relatedness. The results indicated that the words with higher interpersonal relatedness would induce greater negativity and higher level of arousal.
In the study II, an emotional stop signal task was designed by presenting the selected words before each trial as means of mood induction. In this task, stop signal reaction time (SSRT) was estimated and served as the index of response inhibition. The results showed that, as compared with the neutral emotional state, SSRT was significantly longer in the negative emotion with high interpersonal relatedness. This result reflected the phenomenon that response inhibitory control would decrease in negative emotion with high interpersonal relatedness. However, association between borderline personality features and response inhibitory control in both neutral and emotional state was not found in this study. Association between SSRT and self-report impulsivity also failed to replicate. Along with other newly published literature, the result might suggest that response disinhibition had little to do with impulsiveness observed in non-clinical sample with borderline personality features and only reflects certain facet of impulsivity, which is essentially multi-dimensional construct by nature.
On the other hand, the instrument serving to measure borderline personality was also translated and validated in this study. Chinese version Borderline Personality Inventory (BPI) presented fair internal reliability. Association between BPI and instruments measuring psychiatric symptoms, impulsivity and separation- individuation were also found in this study. These findings not only supported the construct validity of BPI, but also suggest that complicated symptomatic configurations, unsolved developmental and behavioral dysregulation might be also complicated with non-clinical sample with borderline personality features.
Subjects
Borderline personality
Impulsive behaviors
Response disinhibition
Interpersonal vulnerability
Psychiatric symptoms
Type
thesis
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