Emotional Reactivity to Sounds in Borderline Personality Disorder

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is widely characterized by severe and chronic problems with emotion regulation. One influential biosocial model (Linehan, 1993) proposes that individuals with BPD are emotionally “vulnerable” to environmental stimuli, whereby they commonly demonstrate heightened reactivity (i.e., high magnitude of sympathetically mediated arousal), heightened sensitivity (i.e., emotional responding occurs across a wide range of stimuli at low levels of intensity), and a delayed return to baseline emotional arousal. Although recent studies have found preliminary evidence in support of this theoretical model of BPD (Stigylmeyer et al., 2005), more research is needed to better characterize emotional vulnerability in BPD. Research on sensory processing disruptions (McIntosh et al., 1999) has demonstrated that, compared to healthy controls, individuals with sensory processing disorder (SPD) evidence heightened electrodermal responding and delayed recovery to affectively neutral laboratory stimuli. In the present project, we are examining whether individuals with BPD, compared to healthy controls, can be characterized by heightened sensitivity, reactivity, and delayed recovery in response to auditory stimuli (i.e., sounds).

In our first study published from this project (Rosenthal, Ahn, & Geiger, in press) we recently found that individuals with BPD self-report being more reactive than healthy controls across most sensory stimuli. However, the difference between BPD and controls was greatest for unpleasant sounds compared to other senses. Our next step is to examine objective measures of reactivity to unpleasant sounds.