Borderline personality disorder is associated with lower confidence in perception of emotional body movements

Abstract

Much recent research has shown that personality disorders are associated with an altered emotion perception. Whereas most of this research was conducted with stimuli such as faces, the present study examined possible differences in the perception of emotions expressed via body language and body movements. 30 patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and 30 non-patients observed video scenes of emotional human interactions conveyed by point-light displays, rated the depicted valence, and judged their confidence in this rating. Patients with BPD showed no altered emotion perception (i.e., no biased perception in either a negative or a positive direction). They did not perceive and evaluate depicted emotions as being more extreme than healthy controls. However, patients with BPD showed less confidence in their perception of depicted emotions, especially when these were difficult to identify. The findings extend insights on altered emotion perception in persons with BPD to include the field of body movements.

Keywords: body movements; borderline personality disorder; embodiment; emotion perception; kinematics; point–light displays; social cognition.

FIGURE 1

Preparation of stimuli. Point–light displays were created by attaching 13 reflective markers to an actor’s head, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, and ankles. They were then tracked using a Vicon motion-capture system. (A) Examples of dyadic and monadic point–light displays. (B) Temporal structure of the paradigm. Reprinted from Kaletsch et al. (2014).

FIGURE 2

Average confidence ratings and standard deviations of healthy controls (HCs) and patients with BPD. Error bars represent standard error of mean. *The difference was significant at the 0.05 level.