Attentional mechanisms of borderline personality disorder
- Michael I. Posner*,†,‡,
- Mary K. Rothbart*,†,
- Nathalie Vizueta*,
- Kenneth N. Levy§,¶,
- David E. Evans†,
- Kathleen M. Thomas*, and
- John F. Clarkin§
- *Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, NY 10021;§ Department of Psychiatry, Westchester Division, Weill Medical College, White Plains, NY 10605; ¶Department of Psychology, Hunter College of the City University of New York, New York, NY 10021; and †Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403
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Contributed by Michael I. Posner
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.
Footnotes
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↵ ‡ To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mip2003{at}med.cornell.edu.
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↵ ∥ In unpublished adult studies using the ANT and ATQ we had not found significant correlations between conflict scores and effortful control. The finding of a significant correlation in this study might be due to a larger range of scores when including results from BPD patients and temperamentally matched controls who are relatively low in effortful control as well as advanced students who were relatively high in effortful control. A large range of performance might be important in obtaining the correlation.
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↵ ** Rueda, M. R., Fan, J., McCandliss, B., Halparin, J., Gruber, D., Pappert, L. & Posner, M. I. (2002) Cognit. Neurosci. Soc. Suppl., 21 (abstr.).
- Abbreviations:
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BPD, borderline personality disorder
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ATQ, adult temperament questionnaire
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ANT, attention network test
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RT, reaction time
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- Copyright © 2002, The National Academy of Sciences
