Altered interoception in patients with borderline personality disorder
- \(\bf Background:\) Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) experience difficulties in emotional awareness (alexithymia), and often develop dissociative symptoms, which may reflect broader deficits in interoceptive awareness. Whether this is associated with alterations in cortical processing of interoception is currently unknown. \(\bf Methods:\) We utilized an electrophysiological marker of interoception, i.e. heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEP), and examined its relationship with electrocardiographic correlates of autonomic nervous system (ANS) functioning (heart rate variability), and with self-report measures of alexithymia, dissociation and borderline symptom severity in patients with BPD. \(\bf Results:\) Individuals with BPD had higher HEP amplitudes over frontal electrodes compared to healthy controls. Sympathetic ANS activity was greater in BPD patients than in controls. Across groups, HEP amplitudes were associated with parasympathetic activity over central electrodes and correlated with alexithymia over frontal electrodes. \(\bf Conclusions:\) These findings support the idea that difficulties in emotional awareness in BPD are reflected in altered frontal electrophysiological markers of interception. Therefore, emotional awareness can be understood as failures of modulation between interoceptive and exteroceptive attention. Future research may aim to investigate whether altered interoception and its electrophysiological correlates are malleable by therapeutic intervention.
Author: | Vera FlasbeckORCiDGND, Stoyan PopkirovORCiDGND, Andreas EbertGND, Martin BrüneORCiDGND |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hbz:294-88815 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1186/s40479-020-00139-1 |
Parent Title (English): | Borderline personality disorder and emotion dysregulation |
Subtitle (English): | a study using heartbeat-evoked potentials |
Publisher: | Springer Nature |
Place of publication: | Heidelberg |
Document Type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of Publication (online): | 2022/05/02 |
Date of first Publication: | 2020/10/22 |
Publishing Institution: | Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universitätsbibliothek |
Tag: | Open Access Fonds Alexithymia; Autonomic nervous system; Borderline personality disorder; Dissociation; Heartbeat-evoked potentials; Interoception |
Volume: | 7 |
Issue: | 24 |
First Page: | 1 |
Last Page: | 13 |
Note: | Article Processing Charge funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Open Access Publication Fund of Ruhr-Universität Bochum. |
Institutes/Facilities: | LWL-Universitätsklinikum Bochum, Klinik für Psychiatrie, Psychotherapie und Präventivmedizin, Abteilung für Soziale Neuropsychiatrie und Evolutionäre Medizin |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | Technik, Medizin, angewandte Wissenschaften / Medizin, Gesundheit |
open_access (DINI-Set): | open_access |
Licence (English): | Creative Commons - CC BY 4.0 - Attribution 4.0 International |