Gaze and Evaluative Behavior of Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder in an Affective Priming Task

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is associated with alterations in emotion processing. To date, no study has tested automatic emotion perception under conditions of unawareness of emotion stimuli. We administered a priming paradigm based on facial expressions and measured judgmental and gaze behavior during an evaluation task. A total of 31 patients with BPD and 31 non-patients (NPs) viewed a briefly shown emotional (angry, fearful, sad, or happy) or neutral face followed by a neutral facial expression (target). Areas of interest (AOI) were the eyes and the mouth. All participants included in our analysis were subjectively unaware of the emotional primes. Concerning evaluative ratings, no prime effects were observed. For early dwell time, a significant interaction between prime category and AOI was found. Both BPD patients and NPs dwelled longer on the eyes after the presentation of angry and fearful primes than of happy primes and dwelled longer on the mouth after the presentation of happy primes than of sad and neutral primes. Patients rated target faces more negatively. BPD patients, when compared to NPs, seem not to show alterations in automatic attention orienting due to covert facial emotions. Regardless of primes, individuals with BPD seem to be characterized by an increased negative interpretation of neutral facial expressions.