Cycle 4 - Video 1 - Smarter Than BPD Quiz

Understanding Borderline Personality Disorder and Its Neurobiology

• Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a highly stigmatized and understudied form of psychiatric illness.
• BPD research is generously supported by the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation and families for BPD research.
• BPD has a childhood history of trauma or maltreatment and is highly heritable.
• BPD diagnosis is challenging due to insufficient time for comprehensive assessments and co-occurring psychiatric diagnoses.
• BPD diagnosis requires meeting five of nine criteria in addition to the general criteria for a personality disorder.
• BPD has three core symptom domains: emotion dysregulation, disturbed relatedness, and behavioral dysregulation.
• Emotion dysregulation in BPD refers to wild shifts in emotion and difficulties with anger and emotion regulation strategies.
• BPD has familial risk and a high prevalence of diagnoses associated with emotion dysregulation, such as major depression and social anxiety disorder.
• Neurobiology theory suggests that BPD neural systems involved in representing the intensity of emotions might be dysregulated and hypersensitive to emotional experience.
• Research shows that people with BPD tend to engage in certain emotion regulation strategies that tend not to be very useful in the long run.
• BPD research is focused on stress and neurobiology, and brain stimulation treatments for suicidal ideation and treatment-resistant depression.
• BPD research is supported by organizations such as the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Province of Ontario, and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.Hypersensitivity to emotions and difficulty regulating emotions are two key features of borderline personality disorder (BPD). People with BPD tend to show higher activation in the insular cortex, which is associated with the subjective experience of emotion. There is less activation in regions associated with the regulation of emotion in people with BPD. Neutral faces may not be truly neutral for people with BPD, as they may perceive emotions in faces that others see as emotionless. People with BPD may have better emotion recognition for subtle expressions and difficulty identifying emotions in highly intense faces. Research has found higher activation in the amygdala, a region associated with attention to important stimuli, in people with BPD when viewing neutral faces. There are no significant differences in brain activation between people with BPD and controls when viewing 50% or highly intense fearful faces. The amygdala may play a role in the perceived importance of neutral faces for people with BPD. The dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex is an important brain region in the study of BPD. BPD is associated with both hyperarousal and hypoarousal of emotions, leading to emotional dysregulation. Further research is needed to understand the neural mechanisms underlying BPD and potential treatments.