Deficient amygdala-prefrontal intrinsic connectivity after effortful emotion regulation in borderline personality disorder

Emotion instability in borderline personality disorder (BPD) has been associated with an impaired fronto-limbic inhibitory network. However, functional connectivity (FC) underlying altered emotion regulation in BPD has yet to be established. Here, we used resting-state fMRI to investigate enduring effects of effortful emotion regulation on the amygdala intrinsic FC in BPD. In this multicenter study, resting-state fMRI was acquired before and after an emotion regulation task in 48 BPD patients and 39 non-patient comparison individuals. The bilateral amygdalae were used as a seed in the whole-brain FC analysis and two-way mixed ANOVA to test whether BPD patients exhibited weaker post-task increase in the amygdala intrinsic FC with the prefrontal cortex (PFC), compared to non-patients. Subsequently, we explored whether the results are common for personality disorders characterized by emotional problems, using additional data of 21 cluster-C personality disorder patients. In contrast to non-patients, BPD patients failed to show increased post-task amygdala resting-state FC with the medial, dorsolateral, ventrolateral PFC, and superior temporal gyrus, but surprisingly exhibited decreased FC with the posterior cingulate cortex and increased FC with the superior parietal lobule. In BPD patients, the emotion regulation task failed to increase resting-state amygdala FC with brain regions essential for effortful emotion regulation, which suggests: (a) altered cognitive control typically used to indirectly alleviate distress by reinterpreting the meaning of emotional stimuli; (b) impaired direct regulation of emotional responses, which might be common for personality disorders;

Biased Attention to Facial Expressions of Ambiguous Emotions in Borderline Personality Disorder: An Eye-Tracking Study

Preliminary evidence suggests that biased attention could be crucial in fostering the emotion recognition abnormalities in borderline personality disorder (BPD). We compared BPD patients to Cluster-C personality disorder (CC) patients and non-patients (NP) regarding emotion recognition in ambiguous faces and their visual attention allocation to the eyes. The role of comorbid posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in BPD regarding emotion recognition and visual attention was explored. BPD patients fixated the eyes of angry/happy, sad/happy, and fearful/sad blends longer than non-patients. This visual attention pattern was mainly driven by BPD patients with PTSD. This subgroup also demonstrated longer fixations than CC patients and a trend towards longer fixations than BPD patients without PTSD for the angry/happy and fearful/sad blends. Emotion recognition was not altered in BPD. Biased visual attention towards the eyes of ambiguous facial expressions in BPD might be due to trauma-related attentional bias rather than to impairments in facial emotion recognition.

Always on guard: emotion regulation in women with borderline personality disorder compared to nonpatient controls and patients with cluster-C personality disorder

BACKGROUND

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by emotion dysregulation; however, it is unclear whether this is restricted to negative emotional stimuli or to what degree this is specific to BPD. We investigated neural correlates of hypothesized increased emotional sensitivity and impaired emotion regulation in patients with BPD.

METHODS

During fMRI scanning, patients with BPD, nonpatient controls and patients with cluster-C personality disorder completed an emotion regulation task, including negative, positive and erotic social pictures.

RESULTS

We included 55 patients with BPD, 42 nonpatient controls and 24 patients with cluster-C personality disorder in our analyses. Passive viewing of negative stimuli resulted in greater activity in the anterior insula, temporoparietal junction and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in patients with BPD than in nonpatient controls. The increased activity in the anterior insula and temporoparietal junction was also present when patients with BPD viewed positive stimuli. During regulation of negative stimuli compared with passive viewing, nonpatient controls showed greater activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, middle temporal gyrus and bilateral inferior parietal lobule. Patients with BPD did not show this increase in activity.

LIMITATIONS

Findings cannot be generalized to men, and patients represented a heterogeneous group regarding comorbid diagnoses and medication.

CONCLUSION

When looking at emotional stimuli, patients with BPD showed a unique pattern of activity, suggesting an increase in brain activity involved in emotion generation. In the case of negative stimuli this is accompanied by increased activity in regulation areas. In contrast, increase of regulation processes seems absent when patients with BPD are explicitly instructed to regulate. Results of diagnosis specificity support a dimensional rather than a dichotomous differentiation between BPD and cluster-C personality disorder regarding emotional sensitivity and emotional regulation of social stimuli.

Impulse control under emotion processing: an fMRI investigation in borderline personality disorder compared to non-patients and cluster-C personality disorder patients

Impulsivity is a characteristic syndromal and neurobehavioral feature of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Research suggests an important interaction between high negative emotions and low behavioral inhibition in BPD. However, knowledge about the generalizability across stimulus categories and diagnosis specificity is limited. We investigated neural correlates of hypothesized impaired response inhibition of BPD patients to negative, positive and erotic stimuli, by comparing them to non-patients and cluster-C personality disorder patients. During fMRI scanning, 53 BPD patients, 34 non-patients and 20 cluster-C personality disorder patients completed an affective go/no-go task, including social pictures. BPD patients showed more omission errors than non-patients, independent of the stimulus category. Furthermore, BPD patients showed higher activity in the inferior parietal lobule and frontal eye fields when inhibiting negative versus neutral stimuli. Activity of the inferior parietal lobule correlated positively with the BPD checklist subscale impulsivity. When inhibiting emotional stimuli, BPD patients showed an altered brain activity in the inferior parietal lobe and frontal eye fields, whereas previously shown dysfunctional prefrontal activity was not replicated. BPD patients showed a general responsivity across stimulus categories in the frontal eye fields, whereas effects in the inferior parietal lobe were specific for negative stimuli. Results of diagnosis specificity support a dimensional rather than a categorical differentiation between BPD and cluster-C patients during inhibition of social emotional stimuli. Supported by behavioral results, BPD patients showed no deficiencies in emotionally modulated response inhibition per se but the present findings rather hint at attentional difficulties for emotional information.

Borderline personality disorder classification based on brain network measures during emotion regulation

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is characterized by an increased emotional sensitivity and dysfunctional capacity to regulate emotions. While amygdala and prefrontal cortex interactions are regarded as the critical neural mechanisms underlying these problems, the empirical evidence hereof is inconsistent. In the current study, we aimed to systematically test different properties of brain connectivity and evaluate the predictive power to detect borderline personality disorder. Patients with borderline personality disorder (n = 51), cluster C personality disorder (n = 26) and non-patient controls (n = 44), performed an fMRI emotion regulation task. Brain network analyses focused on two properties of task-related connectivity: phasic refers to task-event dependent changes in connectivity, while tonic was defined as task-stable background connectivity. Three different network measures were estimated (strength, local efficiency, and participation coefficient) and entered as separate models in a nested cross-validated linear support vector machine classification analysis. Borderline personality disorder vs. non-patient controls classification showed a balanced accuracy of 55%, which was not significant under a permutation null-model, p = 0.23. Exploratory analyses did indicate that the tonic strength model was the highest performing model (balanced accuracy 62%), and the amygdala was one of the most important features. Despite being one of the largest data-sets in the field of BPD fMRI research, the sample size may have been limited for this type of classification analysis. The results and analytic procedures do provide starting points for future research, focusing on network measures of tonic connectivity, and potentially focusing on subgroups of BPD.

Patients with borderline personality disorder and comorbid PTSD show biased attention for threat in the facial dot-probe task

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Biased attention to threat is likely to play a crucial role in the dysfunctional emotion-related information processing in borderline personality disorder (BPD). However, the role of comorbid posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has not yet been fully disentangled.

METHODS

BPD patients with (n = 24) and without (n = 46) PTSD, 35 patients with Cluster-C personality disorder and 52 non-patients participated in the facial dot-probe task with angry, happy and neutral faces during automatic (100 ms), controlled (600 ms), and later (1200 ms) stages of information processing.

RESULTS

BPD patients showed a greater congruency effect to angry faces during the controlled stage of processing than controls. Specifically, in BPD with PTSD compared to controls, this effect was due to difficulties disengaging from threat, indicated by slower reaction times to incongruent angry targets compared to neutral trials. Regarding automatic and later stages of information processing, there was no attentional bias (AB) in BPD. None of the groups revealed biased attention for happy faces at any stages of information processing.

LIMITATIONS

We did not include a control group of PTSD patients without BPD. Therefore, we cannot rule out that the present AB in BPD is mainly due to PTSD-specific psychopathology.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings provide first evidence for an AB towards angry faces and difficulties disengaging from these threat-related social cues in adult BPD patients. Although BPD patients in general demonstrated an AB when compared with controls, this effect was especially pronounced for BPD with PTSD, suggesting a significant effect of trauma-related psychopathology on social attention in BPD.

From neuroscience to evidence based psychological treatments - The promise and the challenge, ECNP March 2016, Nice, France

This ECNP meeting was designed to build bridges between different constituencies of mental illness treatment researchers from a range of backgrounds with a specific focus on enhancing the development of novel, evidence based, psychological treatments. In particular we wished to explore the potential for basic neuroscience to support the development of more effective psychological treatments, just as this approach is starting to illuminate the actions of drugs. To fulfil this aim, a selection of clinical psychologists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists were invited to sit at the same table. The starting point of the meeting was the proposition that we know certain psychological treatments work, but we have only an approximate understanding of why they work. The first task in developing a coherent mental health science would therefore be to uncover the mechanisms (at all levels of analysis) of effective psychological treatments. Delineating these mechanisms, a task that will require input from both the clinic and the laboratory, will provide a key foundation for the rational optimisation of psychological treatments. As reviewed in this paper, the speakers at the meeting reviewed recent advances in the understanding of clinical and cognitive psychology, neuroscience, experimental psychopathology, and treatment delivery technology focussed primarily on anxiety disorders and depression. We started by asking three rhetorical questions: What has psychology done for treatment? What has technology done for psychology? What has neuroscience done for psychology? We then addressed how research in five broad research areas could inform the future development of better treatments: Attention, Conditioning, Compulsions and addiction, Emotional Memory, and Reward and emotional bias. Research in all these areas (and more) can be harnessed to neuroscience since psychological therapies are a learning process with a biological basis in the brain. Because current treatment approaches are not fully satisfactory, there is an imperative to understand why not. And when psychological therapies do work we need to understand why this is the case, and how we can improve them. We may be able to improve accessibility to treatment without understanding mechanisms. But for treatment innovation and improvement, mechanistic insights may actually help. Applying neuroscience in this way will become an additional mission for ECNP.

Looking at the bigger picture: Cortical volume, thickness and surface area characteristics in borderline personality disorder with and without posttraumatic stress disorder

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe psychiatric disorder accompanied by multiple comorbidities. Neuroimaging studies have identified structural abnormalities in BPD with most findings pointing to gray matter volume reductions in the fronto-limbic network, although results remain inconsistent. Similar alterations were found in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a common comorbidity of BPD. Only a small number of studies have investigated structural differences in BPD patients regarding comorbid PTSD specifically and studies conducting additional surface analyses are scarce. We investigated structural differences in women with BPD with and without PTSD and non-patient controls. Automated voxel-based and region-based volumetric analyses were applied. Additionally, four surface-based measures were analyzed: cortical thickness, gyrification index, fractal dimension, and sulcus depth. Analyses did not identify cortical volume alterations in the fronto-limbic network. Instead, hypergyrification was detected in the right superior parietal cortex in BPD patients compared to non-patient controls. No distinction was revealed between BPD patients with and without PTSD. These findings underline the importance of a holistic investigation examining volumetric and surface measures as these might enhance the understanding of structural alterations in BPD.

Neural correlates of intimate picture stimuli in females

Jacob et al. (2011) previously reported on intimate picture stimuli for emotion research in females in Psychiatry Research. Difficulties to engage in intimate relations constitute problems of many mental disorders, and intimacy must be differentiated from pure sex drive. Functional neuroimaging is an important tool to understand the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders. We now studied cerebral activation in response to intimate stimuli in 35 healthy women. Comparison stimuli were taken from the International Affective Picture System. Neuroimaging revealed increased activation in bilateral occipitotemporal, parietal and anterior cingulate cortices extending to the orbitofrontal area. These data reflect cognitive, emotional and motivational compounds congruent with previous neuroimaging data of attachment and long term romantic relationships. Lateral prefrontal, posterior insular regions and the fusiform face area were more active during control images. Our data present a solid basis for use in psychiatric samples.

Amygdala connectivity and aggression

Neurobiological models propose that reactive aggression is predicated on impairments in amygdala-prefrontal connectivity that subserves moral decision-making and emotion regulation. The amygdala is a key component within this neural network that modulates reactive aggression. We provide a review of amygdala dysfunctional brain networks leading to reactive aggressive behavior. We elaborate on key concepts, focusing on moral decision-making and emotion regulation in a developmental context, and brain network connectivity factors relating to amygdala (dys)function-factors which we suggest predispose to reactive aggression. We additionally discuss insights into the latest treatment interventions, providing the utilization of the scientific findings for practice.