Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jan 30, 2026

Use of a Psychophysiological Script-driven Imagery Experiment to Study Trauma-related Dissociation in Borderline Personality Disorder
Published on: March 8, 2018
Biased Attention to Facial Expressions of Ambiguous Emotions in Borderline Personality Disorder: An Eye-Tracking
Deborah Kaiser1, Gitta A Jacob2, Linda van Zutphen3
1Department of Psychology, University of Freiburg, Germany.
Abstract:
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.
Related Concept Videos
Borderline Personality Disorder
Genetic and Environmental Contributions
Borderline Personality...
Emotional Expression
Universal Facial Expressions
Psychologist Paul Ekman identified seven basic...
Muscles for Facial Expressions
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
Diagnostic Criteria and Symptoms
To diagnose ADHD, symptoms must manifest before age 12 and be evident across multiple settings....
Antisocial Personality Disorder
Behavioral Characteristics and...
Personality Disorders: Paranoid and Schizoid
Paranoid Personality Disorder
Paranoid personality disorder is...

