Cognitive and emotional processing associated with borderline personality disorder

Borderline personality disorder is associated with inter-social difficulties where daily stress, and especially relationship stress, motivate individuals to act on emotional reactions. Especially in borderline personality disorder, empathising based on emotional reactions substantially increases the risk of inaccurate and over-exaggerated behaviour and confusion or bias from difficulties rationalising. Upon establishing a theoretical model explaining borderline personality behaviour within intimate and non-intimate relationships, and with reminders of trauma, empathy was investigated outside the relationship context. Contextually, results suggested that emotional sensitivities or negative memory bias associated with negative self-defining or generic long term memory processes contribute to borderline personality psychopathology.