Publication details
Frontal Alpha Asymmetry does not reflect social exclusion and overinclusion in patients with borderline personality disorder: a resting-state high-density EEG study
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a psychiatric diagnosis characterized by a pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, affects and marked impulsivity with a prevalence of 5.9 % in the general population. Since the differential diagnosis can be challenging, it is important to investigate objective diagnostic methods for this disorder. Frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) is considered to be a promising electrophysiological correlate of emotions, emotional regulation, and psychopathology. Asymmetry scores are calculated by subtracting the natural log-transformed alpha power for homologous left and right pairs of frontal electrodes using the formula (ln[right]-ln[left]). Emotion dysregulation is a core feature of BPD, which makes FAA a potential objective neurophysiological biomarker of the disorder.The aim of this study was to explore the cerebral processing in patients with BPD during experimentally induced social interactions, in which emotions and emotional regulation were supposed to occur. To this end, 22 patients diagnosed with BPD and 23 healthy controls underwent a simultaneous fMRI and 256-channel EEG recording during a Cyberball task. Thirty-second periods of exclusion, inclusion, and overinclusion conditions were repeated pseudorandomly, each period being followed by another thirty-second period of resting state. Only the resting-state EEG was analyzed in the current study using the metric of FAA. In the previous fMRI study on the same dataset, it was found that participants with BPD experienced higher levels of tension and more unpleasant emotions compared to healthy controls across all experimental conditions. In the current study, a representative subset of these participants was examined. We hypothesized there would be a difference in EEG data between groups and conditions. However, compared to healthy controls, participants with BPD did not show any significant difference in FAA during the resting state after any of the three conditions. Moreover, we did not find any significant differences in FAA among different conditions in either of the two groups. Based on these results, we suggest that the FAA investigated in the Cyberball task: i) does not reliably reflect the psychopathology in BPD and ii) is not related to differences in emotions or emotion regulations induced within the task. In conclusion, our data do not support the FAA in the Cyberball task to be considered as a potential biomarker of the BPD. |