Photo credit: Neuroscience News
The brain confuses itself and others in personality disorder.
A recent study published in Psychiatry Research Neuroimaging has shown that the neural differences related to identity instability traits in borderline personality disorder.
PsyPost reports that by analyzing brain patterns through a technique called Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (INIRS), the researchers found that individuals who struggle with identity instability exhibit more similar brain activity when judging their traits and imagining how others perceive them. This suggests that people with borderline personality traits may have difficulty distinguishing between themselves and others at a neural level.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a mental health condition marked by unstable relationships, a fluctuating self-image, and impulsive behaviours. People with BPD often struggle with understanding themselves and others. This can lead to misunderstandings, difficulties in relationships, and emotional instability.
Previous research suggested that this condition stemmed from an inability to accurately differentiate between one’s thoughts and the perspectives of others. However, directly measuring this cognitive function has been challenging. The researchers wanted to explore whether these difficulties could be observed in the brain by examining the neural patterns of people with borderline personality traits when asked to judge their characteristics and those of others.
The researchers used a brain imaging technique called INIRS, which is non-invasive and measures brain activity by monitoring blood oxygen levels in the brain. Participants completed a task that required them to rate how well various personality traits applied to themselves and to others. These others included people they were close to, such as friends and acquaintances with whom they interacted regularly but did not feel particularly close. In addition to these self-other comparisons, the participants judged word meanings in a non-social task, which served as a control.
The researchers recorded participants’ brain activity while they performed test tasks, and they analyzed how similar the brain’s responses were across different conditions, such as when participants judged themselves, thought about others, and tried to imagine how others perceived them.
The study’s findings focused on the differences in how the brain processed information when participants thought about themselves versus others. The researchers found that the brain activity of individuals with higher borderline personality traits showed more similarity between self-judgment and third-person judgment. This neural similarity suggests that individuals with these traits may have difficulty mentally separating their perspective from the perspective of others, which could contribute to their sense of identity instability.
Participants’ neural patterns differed when they judged people they didn’t feel close to, suggesting that the difficulty in separating self and others may be more pronounced in close, emotionally relevant relationships. These findings support the idea that people with borderline traits may conflate their thoughts and emotions with those of others, especially when the other person is someone close to them.
On the other hand, impulsive behaviours, another key aspect of borderline personality disorder, were not predicted by the same neuron patterns. This suggests that different processes in the brain may drive impulsive actions than those responsible for identity instability.
While the study provides valuable insights, it has several limitations.
First, the INIRS provides less detailed information than other methods, like functional MRI. Another limitation is that the researchers measured brain activity during specific task conditions, which may not fully capture how individuals with borderline traits behave in real-world social interactions.
