Subjective emotional responses to IAPS pictures in patients with borderline personality disorder, cluster-C personality disorders, and non-patients.

According to Linehan (1993), emotion dysregulation is a central feature of borderline personality disorder (BPD). We hypothesized that patients with BPD are emotionally hyperresponsive. For BPD treatment, it is important to evaluate this hypothesis, because, if it is supported, therapeutic interventions could be designed to help patients to better manage hyperemotional reactions. We investigated the subjective reactions (in terms of valence and arousal) of patients with BPD to visual emotional stimuli of the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). We hypothesized that, compared to patients with Cluster-C personality disorders and non-patients, BPD patients would show higher scores on the arousal dimension and higher negative scores on the valence dimension when rating IAPS pictures with varying degrees of arousal and valence. Ratings of valence and arousal for 40 IAPS pictures were collected from 39 borderline personality disorder (BPD), 36 patients diagnosed with Cluster-C personality disorders (PD), and a group of 226 non-patients. Contrary to expectations, BPD patients did not differ from the non-patients. This indicates that their self-report scores do not reflect hypersensitivity. We found that patients with BPD showed lower scores on arousal than Cluster-C PD patients. The scores on valence suggested that Cluster-C PD patients also experienced more positive emotions than BPD patients.

[Developmental trajectories of anxiety disorder symptoms in adolescents: a five-year prospective community study]. / Ontwikkelingstrajecten van angstsymptomen: een vijfjarig prospectief onderzoek onder adolescenten uit de algemene populatie.

BACKGROUND: The relatively recent adoption of modern statistical analysis methods, such as latent growth modelling (lgm), makes it possible to study differences in the individual trajectories of development over time. AIM: To examine prospectively the developmental trajectories of anxiety disorder symptoms in a large sample of adolescents (N = 1,318) from the general population over a period of five years. METHOD: The adolescents were divided into two cohorts: early adolescents (average age 12 at the first measurement) and middle adolescents (average age 16 at the first measurement). Age and gender differences in the developmental trajectories of adolescent anxiety disorder symptoms over time were examined by means of lgm. results Over the course of five years there was a slight decrease in panic disorder, school anxiety and separation anxiety disorder symptoms for all adolescents, with the exception of social phobia symptoms, which remained fairly stable over time. Adolescent girls showed a slight increase in generalised anxiety disorder symptoms over time, whereas these symptoms decreased among adolescent boys. CONCLUSION: The use of individual trajectory-based analyses, enabled us to study advance our understanding of age and gender differences in the development of adolescent anxiety symptoms.