Attention Bias in Emotional Faces in Borderline Personality Disorder

Abstract

The main characteristic of a borderline personality disorder (BPD) is an interpersonal relationship difficulty. The attentional bias (AB) would be the differential location to stimuli considered threatening to the detriment of neutral stimuli. Knowing whether people with BPD has a biased attentional processing in the face of facial expressions is relevant to help better understand the pathology and give more focus to clinical interventions. Objective: Investigate AB on emotional faces in people with BPD in the dot-probe task using eye tracking. Method: participants were N=12 people with borderline personality traits (clinical group) and N=13 with depression (control-clinical group) who responded to a dot-probe task with emotional faces in the exposure times of 250ms and 1000ms. Results: There were group differences in reaction time for the emotional face of anger in 250ms with the clinical group being faster to respond to the trials than the control group. Regarding eye tracking, there were differences in groups, which control group looked more at the eyes of the neutral faces than the clinical group in incongruent trials. Conclusions: Study suggests that there is AB for emotional faces of anger in people with BPD at automatic processing stage. Therapeutic interventions focused on BPD is suggested.