The Investigation of Facial Affect Recognition and Interpersonal Problems in People with Borderline Personality Disorder Symptoms Compared with Healthy Individuals

Aim and Emotion dysregulation, as one of the main symptoms of borderline personality disorder (BPD), has significant effects on emotional perception in this group of patients. Given the importance of facial affect recognition in social interactions and contradictory results of researches that have evaluated the emotion recognition of patients with BPD in the past, the aim of the present study was to investigate emotion recognition in individuals with borderline personality symptoms and the relationship between these symptoms and interpersonal interactions in these individuals.
Methods and Materials: The study subjects included 30 people; 15 with the symptom of BPD and 15 healthy subjects as control group. Subjects were selected from among the related statistical population through convenience sampling. The Borderline Personality Inventory (BPI) and Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP) were completed and facial affect recognition task was conducted on the two groups.
Findings: The findings of this study suggest that people with BPD symptoms have poor performance in facial affect recognition compared to their healthy counterparts (F = 1.5, P Deficits in facial affect recognition may underlie interpersonal problems in people with the symptoms of BPD. Therefore, paying attention to emotion recognition as an effective factor in social interactions can help us better understand underlying factors of social dysfunction in patients with BPD.