Self-Concept as a Moderator in the Relationship Between Borderline Personality Disorder and Reading Mental States
Open Access
- Author:
- Pantelides, Joanna
- Area of Honors:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Kenneth N. Levy, Thesis Supervisor
Kenneth N. Levy, Thesis Honors Advisor
Dr. Frank Gerard Hillary, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- Borderline personality disorder
mental state decoding
emotion recognition
self-concept clarity
reading the mind in the eyes
identity - Abstract:
- Purpose: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a highly prevalent, chronic, and debilitating disorder. Epidemiological studies consistently reveal that about 2% of the general population and up to 20% of mental health outpatients suffer from the disorder. Unstable interpersonal relationships, emotion dysregulation, angry outbursts, and suicidality are symptoms central to BPD. Prominent theories of BPD suggest that the difficulties observed are related. The purpose of the current study was to examine the moderating effect of self-concept on the relationship between BPD and emotion recognition. Method: Participants were 50 adults, 31 reliably diagnosed with BPD and 19 healthy controls (HC). Ninety-two percent were female and seventy-eight percent were Caucasian. The mean age was 27.44 (SD=12.36). Procedure: Diagnosis was established using the International Personality Disorders Examination (IPDE). In a separate session, participants completed a computerized measure designed to assess participants’ capacity to infer mental status (e.g., happy, sad, worried) from photographs of just the eye region of the face, called the Reading Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), and completed a number of self-report measures, including the Self-Concept Clarity Scale (SCCS). Hypotheses: It was predicted that participants with BPD would exhibit poor self-concept clarity in relation to healthy control participants. It was hypothesized that the ability to decode mental status would be impaired in those with BPD as compared to healthy controls. It was also hypothesized that individuals with BPD would display longer reaction times than healthy controls, particularly when it comes to negative emotions. The final hypothesis was that self-concept clarity would moderate the relationship between BPD diagnosis and performance on the RMET such that people with BPD and better self-concept clarity would respond to facial stimuli more accurately and display a shorter reaction time as compared to people with BPD and poor self-concept ii clarity. Results: Those with BPD performed worst on the SCCS than the healthy controls did, suggesting that they have poorer self-concept clarity. Contrary to our hypotheses, the BPD group did not perform significantly different from the HC group in overall or valence-specific RME accuracy. However, there were significant differences between the diagnostic groups in terms of overall and valence-specific RME reaction time. Upon controlling for age, the interaction between diagnosis and self-concept clarity score was not significant in RMET performance. Conclusions: Results revealed no significant moderating effects of self-concept clarity for both RMET accuracy and reaction time. These findings suggest that self-concept clarity may not in fact moderate the relationship between BPD and performance on the RMET, and that there may be another variable that better accounts for the observed variation.