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.

Via: http://ht.ly/RRdUn HT https://twitter.com/UniboMagazine

More at:  http://twitter.com/Prison_Health

Categorical Perception of Fear and Anger Expressions in Whole, Masked and Composite Faces

Below:  Design of Experiment 1.

Illustration of a face morphed from the original fearful (outer left) to the original angry expression (outer right) in 9 intermediary steps, resulting in a total of 11 face morphs; a, whole face; b, upper half intact ('eyes' condition); c, lower half intact ('mouth' condition); due to copyright restrictions, the depicted example is an in-house generated averaged face based on 16 different identities and not depicting an actual person. This example is a representative illustration of the type of stimuli used but was not itself part of the present experiment.

Below:  Design of Experiment 2 (Composite Face).

Illustration of a face morphed from the original fearful (outer left) to the original angry expression (outer right) in 9 intermediary steps, resulting in a total of 11 face morphs; a, eye judgements with 100% angry lower face half; b, eye judgements with 100% fearful lower half; c, mouth judgements with 100% angry upper face half; d, mouth judgements with 100% fearful upper half; conditions a and b or conditions c and d were always presented in one block, to aid participants in focusing on one face half only; due to copyright restrictions, the depicted example is an in-house generated face which was not used in the present experiment.

Human observers are remarkably proficient at recognizing expressions of emotions and at readily grouping them into distinct categories. When morphing one facial expression into another, the linear changes in low-level features are insufficient to describe the changes in perception, which instead follow an s-shaped function. Important questions are, whether there are single diagnostic regions in the face that drive categorical perception for certain parings of emotion expressions, and how information in those regions interacts when presented together. We report results from two experiments with morphed fear-anger expressions, where (a) half of the face was masked or (b) composite faces made up of different expressions were presented. When isolated upper and lower halves of faces were shown, the eyes were found to be almost as diagnostic as the whole face, with the response function showing a steep category boundary. In contrast, the mouth allowed for a substantially lesser amount of accuracy and responses followed a much flatter psychometric function. When a composite face consisting of mismatched upper and lower halves was used and observers were instructed to exclusively judge either the expression of mouth or eyes, the to-be-ignored part always influenced perception of the target region. In line with experiment 1, the eye region exerted a much stronger influence on mouth judgements than vice versa. Again, categorical perception was significantly more pronounced for upper halves of faces. The present study shows that identification of fear and anger in morphed faces relies heavily on information from the upper half of the face, most likely the eye region. Categorical perception is possible when only the upper face half is present, but compromised when only the lower part is shown. Moreover, observers tend to integrate all available features of a face, even when trying to focus on only one part.

Read more at:   http://goo.gl/79BKBK HT @uniaktuell

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