Main content

Contributors:
  1. Nikolaus Kleindienst
  2. Christian Schmahl

Date created: | Last Updated:

: DOI | ARK

Creating DOI. Please wait...

Create DOI

Category: Project

Description: Social cognition in borderline personality disorder (BPD) is biased towards enhanced processing of negative social information, possibly contributing to instability in interpersonal relationships. To experimentally test enhanced memory retrieval of negative social information, using a newly developed variant of a looking-at-nothing paradigm, 45 BPD patients and 36 healthy women learned positive and negative personality traits of different target persons. In a translational memory test, participants were asked to use the learned information to evaluate statements about the target person. In addition to behavioral measures of memory performance, we investigated eye gaze patterns to further decompose memory retrieval processes. We hypothesized that BPD patients would retrieve negative as compared to positive person information more accurately than healthy controls, and show increased eye gaze towards spatial locations where negative information was provided during the learning phase. Results pointed to more accurate retrieval of negative person attributes in BPD as compared with healthy controls (HC), thereby corroborating previous findings of a negativity bias in social cognition in BPD. The observed negativity bias in BPD was associated with stronger expectancies to be rejected by others. No group differences regarding fixation behavior were found. We propose that enhanced retrieval of negative person information might be associated with dysfunctional cognitive schemas as well as reduced behavioral trust, and be of relevance for mental disorders characterized by interpersonal difficulties.

License: CC-By Attribution 4.0 International

Files

Loading files...

Citation

Tags

Recent Activity

Loading logs...

OSF does not support the use of Internet Explorer. For optimal performance, please switch to another browser.
Accept
This website relies on cookies to help provide a better user experience. By clicking Accept or continuing to use the site, you agree. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and information on cookie use.
Accept
×

Start managing your projects on the OSF today.

Free and easy to use, the Open Science Framework supports the entire research lifecycle: planning, execution, reporting, archiving, and discovery.