中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: Borderline personality disorder is the most common type of personality disorder identified in clinical practice. Affective dysregulation and disturbed relationships are the significant features of this disorder. Difficulty in separation-individuation processing might be the core psychopathology, which led to inappropriate perception the emotion state of self and others resulting disturbed personal relatedness. The present study explores the influence of borderline personality on the functions of emotional awareness and empathy. Emotional awareness is the ability to perceive one's own and others' emotions. Empathy is being able to interpret others' feelings and thoughts from their perspective, feeling others' emotional experiences, and obtaining the same feeling. Methods: Participants included 31 patients with borderline personality disorder diagnosed by a trained psychiatrist and 31 healthy individuals. Patients group had 29 females and 2 males with mean age of 30.32 years old, while the control group had also 29 females and 2 males with mean age of 30.32 year old. Emotional awareness, empathy, and emotional faces integrated with tone recognition tasks were assessed. Results: Patients with borderline personality had poor performance on the awareness of perceiving ones' and others' emotions. They also had poorer performance on the perspective-taking measure and higher scores on the personal distress measure than the control group. Conclusion: Inability to distinguish one's own and others' emotional status and impaired perspective-taking may lead to stronger feelings of personal suffering in patients with borderline personality disorder. The related intervention to improve cognitive empathy is discussed.