1. Attentional mechanisms of borderline personality disorder Posner et al. (2002)

2. Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD): Emotional disregulation Black and white thinking Instability of mood and behaviour  E.g. inappropriate and intense anger Difficulty integrating self-image and interpersonal relationships Co-Morbidity with Bi-Polar, depression, anxiety disorders, ADD, eating disorders.

3. This Study: Possible to relate higher order cognitive functions to brain systems. (Kandel; 1998, 1999) Patients with BPD => high negative affect and low effortful control These reflect the DSM-IV criteria of chronic emptiness and poor control of moods and emotions. If this is the case, do BPD patients show impairment on tasks using systems implied in emotional control and attention? What can this tell us about the aetiology of BPD

4. Method (1): 3 subject groups assessed for effortful control (EC) & negative affect (NA): 39 BPD patients 22 temperament matched controls (ATQ assessed) 30 controls (average temperament) Compared performance on RT task: ANT-assesses efficiency of 3 attentional control networks (Fan et al., 2002) Alerting Orienting Conflict resolution

5. Method(2): ANT

6. Results(1): Sig. effects of cue and target, but no between group differences in overall mean RT. No between group diff. in alerting / orienting scores. Sig. effect of group membership on Conflict res. Scores. => BPD differed from normal controls BUT not matched controls =>Why?

7. Results (2): Correlated conflict res. scores with effortful control (EC) measures (ATQ): Sig. negative correlation: r = -.29 (p<0.01) i.e. the lower a Ss EC, the slower their RT in incongruent target condition. EC showed negative correlation with Negative Affect (NA): r = -.68 i.e. the higher a Ss NA the lower their EC

8. Conclusions(1): BPD Ss =>Impairment in attentional network involved in conflict resolution (i.e.cognitve control) Found in purely cog. Task; no emotional aspect. =>links BPD to neural mechanisms. This impairment only present in patients =>EC temperament may be a risk factor for BPD but not the whole story. BPD patients often present with backgrounds of abuse =>EC temp. combined with aspects of socialisation combine to produce BPD. OR: social factors => inappropriate development of attentional systems.

9. Conclusions(2): Causes of BDP? Attentional deficit tells us about anatomy of BPD impairments. Links between network & EC. Links between development, network, & BPD. Link between EC, empathy & BPD characteristics.