Borderline Personality Disorder
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a personality disorder characterized by:
- a poorly developed or unstable self-image
- chronic feelings of emotional emptiness
- intense, unstable, and conflicted close relationships, marked by mistrust, neediness, and anxious preoccupation with real or imagined abandonment
- extreme idealization and devaluation of relationships
- intense fears of rejection by and/or separation from significant others
Substance use disorders, depression, and eating disorders are also commonly associated with BPD. BPD has been linked neurologically to impaired functioning in regions of the brain involved in the regulation of stress responses and emotion, affecting the hippocampus, the orbitofrontal cortex, and the amygdala.
BPD has been linked to an unstable upbringing. Instead of a steady stream of predictable feedback, someone with BPD has a childhood more like a slot machine, receiving intermittent instead of stable reinforcement. Research suggests that relations to childhood upbringing in people with BPD include low maternal affection as well as sexual and physical abuse. Someone with BPD may not have developed a stable sense of self, because there were no predictable rules of engagement. Their brains are constantly in simulation overdrive, trying to figure out how to consistently feel loved, or at least alive. And we can become addicted to the way we view ourselves. Like rats pressing levers or people posting on Facebook, they are unconsciously seeking ways to engineer that next dopamine hit.
Poor operant conditioning could lead to significantly distorted subjective bias in people with BPD, which can influence how mental simulations evolved to allow us to anticipate potential outcomes and make the best approach. People with BPD, especially when emotionally dysregulated, may often incorrectly interpret actions and outcomes (theirs and others’). This bias results in a failure to accurately simulate mental states (both those of others and their own). This psychological barrier can, for instance, explain the lavish attention that they bestow on others when starting a relationship; the intense interest seems justified to them but completely blown out of proportion or even creepy to others. And then what happens when their partner in a romantic relationship starts pulling back? If my baseline framework is that I want love (attention), I assume that the other person wants this as well, and I give her more love instead of stepping back to see what is real and accurate from her perspective—namely, that she may be feeling smothered. In other words, people with BPD may have difficulty with operant conditioning, and therefore may likewise have trouble predicting outcomes of interpersonal interactions. As in addictions in which drug seeking occupies much of one’s time and mental space, people who carry a BPD diagnosis may be unknowingly angling for attention as a way to fill a deep feeling of emptiness, one short-acting dopamine hit at a time.
References
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Brewer, Judson. The Craving Mind Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits Chapter 4. Addicted to Ourselves (Location 1152). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_personality_disorder
Metadata
Type:🔵 Tags: Psychology / Biology / Neuroscience Status:☀️