Anger Rumination & Aggressive Behavior in Borderline Personality Disorder

BACKGROUND:

Emotional instability and dyscontrolled behaviours are central features in borderline personality disorder (BPD). Recently, some cognitive dysfunctional mechanisms, such as anger rumination, have been found to increase negative emotions and promote dyscontrolled behaviours. Even though rumination has consistently been linked to BPD traits in non-clinical samples, its relationship with problematic behaviour has yet to be established in a clinical population.

METHODS:

Enrolled patients with personality disorders (93 with BPD) completed a comprehensive assessment for personality disorder symptoms, anger rumination, emotional dysregulation and aggression proneness.

RESULTS:

Anger rumination was found to significantly predict aggression proneness, over and above emotional dysregulation. Furthermore, both BPD diagnosis and anger rumination were significant predictors of aggression proneness.

CONCLUSION:

Future research should examine whether clinical techniques aimed at reducing rumination are helpful for reducing aggressive and other dyscontrolled behaviours in treating patients with BPD.

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Competition Makes Faces Look More Aggressive

Observers use facial appearance to predict social behavior and individuals' personality traits. We examined the possibility that social contexts can also influence face perception. To investigate the relationship between competitive social contexts and perceived appearance, we leveraged a known link between aggression and a simple physiognomic cue: the facial width-to-height ratio (WHR). Faces with higher WHRs are perceived as being more aggressive (Carre, McCormick, & Mondloch, 2009) and individuals with naturally higher WHRs exhibit more aggressive behavior (Carre & McCormick, 2008). 

Participants played a simple skill game either in competition (N=30) or cooperation (N=30) with a confederate prior to reconstructing the facial appearance of their opponent/partner and a refereeing third party by arranging segmented facial features on a screen until they had produced a best likeness of the target individual. We anticipated that higher perceived aggression during competition would lead to higher reconstructed WHRs than cooperation. 

The results supported this prediction: participants' reconstructions had significantly higher WHRs (p< 0.01) following a competitive interaction for both the observer's opponent and the referee. A follow-up experiment that included competitive (N=30) and cooperative interaction (N=30), as well as a baseline condition with no salient social component (N=30) replicated and extended this result. In this second task, we observed a main effect of social context (F(1,87)=5.14, p=0.008) and post-hoc tests revealed that competition led to higher WHRs than cooperation (p=0.013) or the baseline condition (p=0.026), while WHRs in the cooperation group did not differ from those in the baseline group (p=0.96). 

This suggests that competition and subsequent perceived aggression systematically bias perceived appearance, while cooperation has little direct effect. These results demonstrate that the social perception of faces is not merely a feed-forward process, but instead that the social contexts in which people interact can shape face perception

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Distinctive Effects of Fear and Sadness Induction on Anger and Aggressive Behavior

Below:  The relationships between mutual promotion and mutual restraint and the emotions of joy, thinking/anxiety, sadness, fear, and anger. The promotion relationships include the following: joy promotes thinking/anxiety, thinking/anxiety promotes sadness, sadness promotes fear, fear promotes anger, and anger promotes joy. The restraint relationships include the following: joy counteracts sadness, sadness counteracts anger, anger counteracts thinking/anxiety, thinking/anxiety counteracts fear, and fear counteracts joy.

A recent study has reported that the successful implementation of cognitive regulation of emotion depends on higher-level cognitive functions, such as top-down control, which may be impaired in stressful situations. This calls for “cognition free” self-regulatory strategies that do not require top-down control. In contrast to the cognitive regulation of emotion that emphasizes the role of cognition, traditional Chinese philosophy and medicine views the relationship among different types of emotions as promoting or counteracting each other without the involvement of cognition, which provides an insightful perspective for developing “cognition free” regulatory strategies. In this study, we examined two hypotheses regarding the modulation of anger and aggressive behavior: sadness counteracts anger and aggressive behavior, whereas fear promotes anger and aggressive behavior. Participants were first provoked by reading extremely negative feedback on their viewpoints (Study 1) and by watching anger-inducing movie clips (Study 2). Then, these angry participants were assigned to three equivalent groups and viewed sad, fear-inducing, or neutral materials to evoke the corresponding emotions. The results showed that participants displayed a lower level of aggressive behavior when sadness was later induced and a higher level of anger when fear was later induced. These results provide evidence that supports the hypothesis of mutual promotion and counteraction relationships among these types of emotions and imply a “cognition free” approach to regulating anger and aggressive behavior.

Via:  http://ht.ly/Pbupn   MT @FrontPsychol