Emotional Processing and Regulation in Borderline Personality Disorder

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.210806.119How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Borderline personality disorder, emotional processing, emotional regulation, attachment theory, neurophysiology

Abstract

Ability to process and regulate emotions in an appropriate way is essential for individuals to establish healthy social interactions and psychological well-being. High level of negative effects ubiquitous for people with borderline personality disorder (BPD), who suffer from intense insecurity, bad self-image, and impulsivity related to risky behaviors. However, the pathogeny and coping process of these negative emotions in BPD patients are discussed discretely and inadequately. Thus, our review aims to fill the gap and explain the importance of emotional processing and regulation in BPD. We first defined emotional processing and regulation along with their correlates in BPD according to their historical and theoretical contexts. Then, the corresponding special characteristics are summarized based on previous clinical studies from the perspectives of the Polyvagal Theory, Attachment Theory, and neuroscience. It is found that BPD patients have a negative bias and delay on emotional processing, while afterwards their poor coping strategies to those negative emotions may lead to out-of-control behaviors. On the other hand, evidence from neural correlates explained BPD patients’ neural dysfunction resulting in different emotional processing and regulation from that of normal people. Given the light of those discoveries, we suggested that future studies should focus on developing measurements of dynamic emotions, combining neuro-image with sociability performance. Clinicians should also be aware of the internal variation in BPD group by identifying BPD symptoms from “risk” to “chronic”, i.e., intervene BPD patients at a specific time to prevent them forming problematic interpersonal relationships.

Copyright

© 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yufei Li
AU  - Kun Wang
AU  - Yumeng Wang
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/08/09
TI  - Emotional Processing and Regulation in Borderline Personality Disorder
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 5th International Seminar on Education, Management and Social Sciences (ISEMSS 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 633
EP  - 640
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210806.119
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.210806.119
ID  - Li2021
ER  -