The Moderating and Mediating Role of Psychological Resilience in the Relationship Between Borderline Personality...

Objective: This study examined psychological resilience (PR) as a potential moderator and mediator of the association between borderline personality symptoms (BPS) and suicidal ideation (SI) among university students. Method: A cross-sectional design was used with (N = 257) university students. Moderation and mediation were tested in separate, theory-guided models using the PROCESS macro for SPSS, version 28. The moderation model (Model 1) and the mediation model (Model 4) were estimated with heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors (HC3). In the adjusted analyses, sex, age, previous psychological consultation, previous psychotropic medication use, and family history of mental illness were entered as covariates. The indirect effect was evaluated using percentile bootstrap confidence intervals based on (5000) resamples. Results: BPS was positively correlated with SI, whereas PR was negatively correlated with both BPS and SI. In the adjusted moderation model, BPS was positively associated with SI (b = 0.118, p < 0.001) and PR was negatively associated with SI (b = -0.204, p = 0.048), but the interaction term was not significant (b = -0.001, p = 0.820) with negligible explained variance (ΔR² = 0.0003). In the adjusted mediation model, BPS was significantly associated with lower PR (a: b = -0.135, p < 0.001), and PR was associated with lower SI while controlling for BPS and the covariates (b: b = -0.216, p = 0.028). The total effect of BPS on SI was significant (c: b = 0.146, p < 0.001), and the direct effect remained significant after including PR (c': b = 0.117, p < 0.001). The indirect effect was significant (ab = 0.029; 95% bootstrap CI [0.005, 0.061]). Conclusions: Psychological resilience did not moderate the association between BPS and suicidal ideation, but it showed a statistically significant indirect association consistent with the proposed mediation model. Higher BPS were associated with lower resilience, which in turn was associated with higher suicidal ideation. These findings suggest that resilience-related targets may complement interventions addressing core BPS-related risk processes, while the cross-sectional design precludes causal conclusions.