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People With Borderline Personality Disorder May Misinterpret Facial Emotions
In studies, patients sometimes saw anger in a ‘neutral’ face and reacted to that threat THURSDAY, May 23 (HealthDay News) — Symptoms of borderline personality disorder often mimic traits of other psychiatric disorders, complicating diagnosis and treatment. But researchers in Canada say they have identified a characteristic that may be unique to borderline personality disorder: a tendency to misinterpret emotions expressed by the face. “They have difficulty processing facial emotions and will see a negative emotion on a neutral face,” said Anthony Ruocco, a clinical neuropsychologist and assistant professor at the University of Toronto. “This is not seen in bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.” Inaccuracies in recognizing anger, sadness, fear and…
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With Borderline Personality Disorder always look for the trigger
In When Hope is Not Enough, I suggest that when asking a validating question, the question that is most effective is: “What happened?” I recommend this because it is open ended and, more importantly, with BPD something usually DID happen to trigger emotional dysregulation. There is almost always a local trigger. This is why I don’t recommend attributing emotional dysregulation to childhood trauma or abuse. With emotional dysregulation, something typically just happened to trigger it. While the conditioned responses – rage or running away – can sometimes be attributed to childhood and the interpretation of the precipitating event can be conditioned from childhood, the actual event is a trigger that sets…
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Unpleasant Words Trigger Strong Startle Response in People with Borderline Personality Disorder
Potential physiological marker for a severe mental disorder August 22, 2007 • Science Update Adults with borderline personality disorder (BPD) showed excessive emotional reactions when looking at words with unpleasant meanings compared to healthy people during an emotionally stimulating task, according to NIMH-funded researchers. They also found that people with more severe BPD showed a greater difference in emotional responding compared to people with less severe BPD. The study was published in the August 1, 2007, issue of Biological Psychiatry. Borderline Personality Disorder is a serious mental illness characterized by intense fear of abandonment and/or rejection, problems controlling emotions, troubled relationships, impulsive or reckless behaviors, and other symptoms. The disorder affects roughly 1.4 percent…
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Contempt and Marriage to someone with BPD
Contempt leads to divorce, because contempt is the opposite of respect. Contempt for a person with BPD’s behavior is, in essence, contempt for their emotions, because, until sorted out and separated, a person with BPD’s behaviors are equivalent to their emotions. They do as they feel. If emotions can been identified, validated, respected and normalized, a behavioral change is certain to follow. No related posts.
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Happy Victimization: Emotion Dysregulation in The Context of Instrumental, Proactive Aggression
How the role of attachment, amygdala response and the mirror neuron system play out in aggression types in BPD and Psychopathy Here is a snip from a very interesting blog post by William Lu, who was a graduate student in psychology when he wrote it in 2010: I recently read a fascinating book chapter written by William Arsenio titled Happy Victimization: Emotion Dysregulation in The Context of Instrumental, Proactive Aggression. Early in the chapter, the author discussed how according to a study, 4-year-old children tended to predict that a bully would feel happy after pushing around some poor chump on the playground, aka happy victimization (Arsenio & Kramer, 1992). However, at age…
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What have you got if you win?
In my book When Hope is Not Enough, I encourage people to be “effective” rather than trying to be right all the time. Here is an excerpt from the book on this point: It is most important to be effective (rather than right all the time) I say, “It is most important to be effective.” What does it mean to be effective? Before I could talk about effectiveness, I had to dismiss being judgmental, because it is a roadblock to effectiveness. Being effective is doing whatever is necessary to gain a positive outcome in any given moment. In the case of emotions, it is doing what is necessary to feel…