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Person Memory in Borderline Personality Disorder assessed with Looking at Nothing Paradigm
- Inga Niedtfeld
- Frank Renkewitz
- Andreas Mädebach
- Karen Hillmann
- Nikolaus Kleindienst
- Christian Schmahl
- Lars Schulze
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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.