2 - (SYM 49) Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Regulation: Considering Symptom Severity and Strategy Selection

Impaired emotion regulation (ER) is a core feature of BPD (APA, 2013; Reich et al., 2012; Salsman & Linehan, 2012). In general, research has not found many differences between those with and without BPD on implementation of specific emotion regulation strategies (Dixon-Gordon, Turner, Rosenthal, & Chapman, 2017; Kuo et al., 2016). Yet such work has typically not examined BPD features continuously. The aim of this study is to bridge this gap by examining the effects of ER strategy implementations in a sample of participants with BPD when they are instructed to either maintain or decrease their emotions. Participants in the current study were 79 adults (M_age = 25.14, SD = 9.26, 98.7% female, 66.7% white) with recent, recurrent self-injurious behaviors and at least 4 criteria of BPD. As part of a larger study, participants completed a diagnostic interview of BPD (SCID-II-BPD; First et al., 1995). They were then instructed to “maintain” and “decrease” their emotions during two negative mood inductions. Participants reported their emotions (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988) and ER strategy use (REQ; Campbell-Sills et al., 2006) after each induction. Heart rate variability and skin conductance were collected during the mood inductions. Preliminary results suggest that the “decrease” instruction resulted in downregulation of negative emotions (F [1, 74] = 6.69, p = .012), but not positive emotions (F[1,74] = 0.75, p = .388). This effect was no longer significant when BPD severity was included in the model. When decreasing emotions, participants endorsed less emotional acceptance and distraction but more suppression. There was a marginal interaction of BPD and suppression resulting in greater negative emotions when decreasing emotions (p = .058). Final results will be presented with physiological data. Overall, these findings suggest that emotion regulation instructions are more difficult to implement for those higher in BPD severity, and that efforts to downregulate typically result in greater emotional avoidance but not necessarily greater use of specific strategies such as distraction. Moreover, the effects of negative emotion regulation do not seem to increase positive emotions for patients with BPD. Important clinical implications and future directions will be discussed.