The Comparison of Emotional Recognition between Outpatients with Borderline Personality Disorder and Normal People Journal Article

"Keywords: Borderline Personality Disorder, Positive Emotion, Negative Emotion, Ekman’s computer-based test Facial recognition of emotion is an ability to infer other people’s emotional states from their facial expression which seems necessary for social relationship, so that the damage to thatleads to disruption in social relationships (Unkoa, Fogd, Fuzy, &Csukly 2011). Furthermore Lynch, Rosenthal, Kosson, Cheavens, Lejuez, & Blair (2006) showed in a study that, BPD patients had better performance in recognition of main emotions (fear, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise and happiness) in comparison to normal people. Furthermore, some of these researches suggested that BPD patients perform worse than normal ones especially in recognition of emotions like anger, disgust, sadness, and fear (Levine, Marziali, & Hood, 1997; Bland, Williams, Scharer, &Maning, 2004). In the other hand, some findings have shown that BPD patients were able to distinguish between facial expressions with positive and negative emotions (Domes, Schulze, & Herbert, 2009; Von Ceumern-Lindenstjerna, Brunner, Parzer, Mundt, Fiedler, & Resch, 2010). According to table 1 it can be said that BPD patients recognize anger emotionless than normal individuals, but considering that they have higher mean scores in recognition of fear, disgust and sadness emotions in comparison to the control group, these indicate that people with Borderline Personality Disorder have high level of emotional sensitivity in recognition of these emotions. BPD patients tend to perceive neutral facial stimulus as a negative stimuli, so they predict fear and threat from them, and therefore the limbic system provides intensive emotional responses (Domes, Czieschnek, Weidler, Berger, Fast, &Herpertz, 2008)."