A laboratory examination of emotion regulation skill strengthening in borderline personality disorder

The present study examined emotion regulation skill strengthening among individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) compared to healthy controls (HCs). Participants were instructed to repeatedly implement two emotion regulation strategies (i.e., distraction and mindful awareness) in response to BPD-relevant stimuli across multiple trials. Throughout the task, both self-reported negativity and positivity, and physiological indices of emotion (i.e., heart rate and skin conductance response) were collected. Results indicated that individuals with BPD and HCs displayed improvements in distraction compared to the control condition, but not in mindful awareness over time. When comparing the two emotion regulation strategies to each other, rate of skill strengthening varied by group. Specifically, HCs evidenced improvements in distraction. In contrast, individuals with BPD evidenced improvements in mindful awareness. These findings suggest that individuals with BPD do not show deficits in skill strengthening as compared to HCs.