Emotional dysregulation is one of the key symptoms in borderline personality disorder often seen in clinical practice. BPD patients report higher affective lability and higher affect-intensity than do patients with other personality disorders. BPD represents a serious health problem, in particular among women. With a lifetime suicide mortality rate of almost 10% (50 times higher than in the general population), BPD afflicts 1% to 2% of the general population and between 10 and 20 % of psychiatric patients. However, compared to other psychiatric diseases, such as depression or schizophrenia, relatively few studies addressed the underlying neuropathophysiologic basis of BPD. It is hypothesised that borderline patients are hyper-responsive to emotional stimuli compared to healthy control subjects. To our knowledge, no EEG-study has examined the role of emotional information processing in BPD.

Thirty BPS-patients are compared to thirty normal control subjects in their electrophysiological response to emotional information. Participants were shown pictures with neutral, positive, and negative valence.

Borderline patients had larger LPP responses as a reaction to pictures with an unpleasant valence as compared to the controls.

Borderline patients show more emotional reactivity to stimuli with unpleasant valence compared to a control group as measured by EEG. Further research could be helpful to examine whether the neurophysiological abnormalities in BPD patients can be influenced by applying cognitive techniques.