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“Feeling Invisible”: Individuals With Borderline Personality Disorder Underestimate the Transparency of Their Emotions

De Meulemeester, Celine; Lowyck, Benedicte; Boets, Bart; Van der Donck, Stephanie; Verhaest, Yannic; Luyten, Patrick; (2023) “Feeling Invisible”: Individuals With Borderline Personality Disorder Underestimate the Transparency of Their Emotions. Journal of Personality Disorders , 37 (2) pp. 213-232. 10.1521/pedi.2023.37.2.213. Green open access

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Abstract

The present study investigated transparency estimation, that is, the ability to estimate how observable one's emotions are, in patients diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) (n = 35) and healthy controls (HCs; n = 35). Participants watched emotionally evocative video clips and estimated the transparency of their own emotional experience while watching the clip. Facial expression coding software (FaceReader) quantified their objective transparency. BPD patients felt significantly less transparent than HCs, but there were no differences in objective transparency. BPD patients tended to underestimate the transparency of their emotions compared to HCs, who in turn overestimated their transparency. This suggests that BPD patients expect that others will not know how they feel, irrespective of how observable their emotions actually are. We link these findings to low emotional awareness and a history of emotional invalidation in BPD, and we discuss their impact on BPD patients’ social functioning.

Type: Article
Title: “Feeling Invisible”: Individuals With Borderline Personality Disorder Underestimate the Transparency of Their Emotions
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1521/pedi.2023.37.2.213
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1521/pedi.2023.37.2.213
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: borderline personality disorder, transparency estimation, facial expressions, mentalizing, emotional arousal
UCL classification: UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Clinical, Edu and Hlth Psychology
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10157823
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