Informace o publikaci
Frontal Alpha Asymmetry does not reflect social exclusion and overinclusion in patients with borderline personality disorder
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2025 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a psychiatric disorder that presents itself as a pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, affects, and marked impulsivity. Currently, there are no objective diagnostic methods for this disorder, which complicates its differential diagnosis. Frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) is an electrophysiological correlate of emotions, emotion regulation, and psychopathology that has been proposed as a promising metric for the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders. 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]). Since emotion dysregulation is a core feature of BPD, FAA could be a potential objective neurophysiological biomarker of the disorder. The aim of this study was to compare the cerebral processing in patients with BPD and healthy controls during experimentally induced social interactions, in which emotions and emotional processing were supposed to occur. We hypothesized there would be a difference in resting state EEG data between groups, since in the previous fMRI study on the current 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. In the study design, 24 patients meeting the criteria for a BPD diagnosis and 27 healthy controls underwent a simultaneous fMRI and 256-channel EEG recording during a Cyberball task that consisted of three experimental conditions with different levels of social inclusion. Thirty-second periods of exclusion, inclusion, and overinclusion were repeated pseudorandomly, each period being followed by another thirty-second period of resting state. Only the resting-state EEG was analyzed using the metric of FAA. Compared to healthy controls, participants with BPD did not show any significant difference in FAA during the resting state in any of the three conditions. Moreover, we did not find any significant differences in FAA among different conditions in either of the two groups. Our data suggests that more research is necessary to ascertain: i) the reliability of FAA in the Cyberball task in reflecting the psychopathology in BPD, and ii) whether FAA is related to differences in emotions or emotion regulations induced within the task. Currently, our data does not support either of these positions and does not support the use of FAA in the Cyberball task as a biomarker of BPD. |