Abstract

This study aimed to elucidate the emotion recognition characteristics of the borderline personality disorder tendency according to social situations. 45 university students aged 18 or older were selected and randomly assigned to a personality disorder tendency group(n=22), and a control group(n=23). The social situation was manipulated as a Cyberball task, and after experiencing social exclusion and social acceptance in turn, the categorical emotional recognition accuracy of facial expression emotions presented in the Face Expression Recognition task (FER) was compared among individuals in the group. In addition, error patterns were analyzed in response to the name of the emotional category to clarify whether the borderline personality disorder tendency group exhibited a biased perception of a specific emotion. Results of this study showed that after experiencing the social exclusion situation, the borderline personality disorder tendency group showed lower emotional recognition accuracy for ‘anger’ emotional expression than the general group, and the error pattern analysis results revealed a perception bias. However, after experiencing the social acceptance situation, the difference in the accuracy rate between groups in all emotional expressions was not significant, and no specific error pattern was found. These findings suggest that the borderline personality disorder tendency group may misunderstand the emotions of others and experience conflict in interpersonal situations as they misrecognize the aggressive clue, ‘anger’ expression, as a clue to rejection. At the same time, patients with borderline personality disorder show a decrease in accuracy and biased perception of facial expression emotional recognition in negative situations such as social exclusion, but not in all interpersonal situations.