Borderline Personality Disorder and Social Interpretation

What is Borderline Personality Disorder?

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by symptoms like:

· Extreme emotional dysregulation

· Dysfunctional interpersonal relationships

· Self-injurious behavior

Treatment is available, though even when symptoms are in remission, the patient may continue to have volatile interpersonal relationships. This is often because of their social learning (e.g., how they’ve learned to relate to other people based on observing and imitating the behaviors of others).

Current Research

The authors Duda et al. from the Yale Department of Psychology took a deeper look at this tendency, recently publishing their research in The Journal of Affective Disorders. It focused on the associations between BPD and depressive symptoms with task-based measures of social interpretation flexibility. They found that BPD symptoms were associated with a reduced ability to revise the social interpretation or a person or situation, regardless of whether they were given positive or negative information that gave greater context. In other words, people with BPD were unlikely to change how they viewed a situation no matter what additional information they were given that might better help them understand why something happened, good or bad.

It’s worth noting that this research had some limitations, including a lack of ethnic diversity. In the future, a wider study pool would likely give us a more nuanced understanding of how social perceptions are affected by changes in information.

My Take

The exact causes of BPD and its accompanying pattern of idealization/devaluation in relationships has yet to fully be pinned down. But the study’s findings help clarify our understanding of this tendency and may help open the door to more effective treatment options. This could include a focus on the concept of social interpretation flexibility, which could potentially help those individuals change the pattern of rocky relationships that often accompany this disorder.