Influence of Social Rejection and Borderline Personality Features on Emotion Perception

Deficits in interpersonal functioning are a core component of borderline personality disorder. Borderline personality disorder is generally associated with misperceptions of social cues including a tendency to perceive others as unfair and rejecting. There is evidence that individuals with subsyndromal borderline personality features also experience these negative outcomes. Furthermore, there is mixed evidence regarding whether individuals with borderline personality disorder have enhanced abilities or deficits in accurately identifying emotions. Therefore, this project examines how social context and borderline personality features affects an individual’s ability to accurately perceive emotions. Participants were randomly assigned to a Cyberball group (inclusion, rejection, overinclusion) and completed a series of self-report measures and an emotion perception task as well as played the Cyberball game. There was no significant main effect of Cyberball condition or borderline status on emotion perception and borderline personality features did not moderate the relationship. Although the findings of this study were not significant, looking at this model in a clinical sample might be beneficial