1. Childhood Trauma as a Mediator of the Relationship between Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Recognition Julie A. Meinert Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a serious and highly prevalent psychological disorder characterized by emotional lability, unstable self-image, impulsivity, chaotic interpersonal relationships, and high levels of suicidality, among other features (Levy, 2013; Skodol et el., 2002). The literature is currently mixed on BPD’s relationship with emotion recognition abilities. However, a recent meta-analysis found significant deficits in emotion recognition in BPD compared to healthy controls, especially in the context of displays of anger and disgust (Daros, Zakanis, & Ruocco, 2012). Additionally, those with BPD often report high levels of traumatic childhood experiences. Maltreated children have been found to do worse on emotion recognition tasks overall. Further, deficits in interpreting certain emotional displays have been found to be associated with certain types of trauma experienced, such as sexual abuse. Hypotheses: 1.Increases in BPD symptoms will be associated with increased trauma severity. 2.Increases in both BPD symptoms and trauma severity will be associated with decreased emotion recognition ability. 3.Trauma severity will mediate the relationship between BPD and emotion recognition. Introduction Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME; Baron-Cohen et al., 2001); evaluates emotion recognition abilities. It contains 36 pictures of the eye region of the face. Participants select the emotion being displayed from four given options. Three emotional subcategories were identified (positive, negative, and neutral). Statistical Analysis One-way analysis of variance was used to examine the differences between groups across RME and CTQ scores. Spearman rank order correlation analyses determined associations between BPD symptoms and RME subscales. To address our second hypothesis, a mediation analysis (Preacher & Hayes, 2004) was conducted to assess if trauma severity mediated the relationship between BPD symptoms and RME scores. The SPSS PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2012) with 5,000 bootstrapped samples was utilized to assess: 1.the effect of BPD symptoms on CTQ scores (“a path”); 2.the effect of CTQ scores on RME scores, controlling for BPD symptoms (“b path”); 3.the direct effect of BPD symptoms on RME scores (“c’ path”); 4.the indirect effect of BPD on RME through CTQ (i.e., mediation). Method Cont. Results There was trend level difference between the clinically diagnosed BPD group and the control group on negative, F(1,53) = 3.81, p =.056, η 2 =.068, and positive RME scores, F(1,53) = 3.90, p =.054, η 2 =.070. BPD symptom severity was positively associated with overall trauma severity, r =.71, p <.001. Dimensional BPD was negatively associated with negative (r = -.29, p =.025), trend level for positive (r = -.25, p =.061), but not neutral (r =.19, p =.16) or overall (r = -.15, p =.25) RME scores. Emotional neglect (r = -.34, p =.009) and overall trauma (r = -.28, p =.033) were negatively associated with negative RME scores. Contrary to hypothesis, the relationship between dimensional BPD severity and negatively valenced RME scores was not mediated by overall trauma, β = -.0009, SE =.0035, 95% CI [-.0086,.0048] (Figure 1), or emotional neglect β = -.0040, SE =.0029, 95% CI [-.0097,.0016] (Figure 2). Results Cont. Dimensional BPD symptoms were associated with deficits in recognizing negative emotional displays, suggesting that problems with recognizing others emotions may contribute to the symptoms of BPD, including emotional lability and interpersonal difficulties. Childhood emotional neglect was associated with difficulty recognizing negative emotions, suggesting that early emotionally void environments may indicate a lack of coherent emotion- specific mental representations later in life. Since trauma severity did not explain the relationship between BPD severity and emotion recognition ability, both trauma and BPD symptoms may be important independent contributors to emotion recognition difficulties. This finding provides an explanation for the mixed findings in the field regarding BPD and emotion recognition abilities as trauma severity may have an independent effect on emotion recognition outcomes and should therefore be assessed in future research. The study was limited by a small sample size and a possible threat to ecological validity due to the laboratory setting in which the RME task was conducted. Discussion References available upon request. Please email Julie Meinert at jqm5400@psu.edu. References Participants Sixty women were included in this study. 22 had a clinical diagnosis of BPD 6 were subthreshold for BPD, meeting < 5 BPD symptoms. 32 were control participants: 11 were temperamentally matched (on impulsivity and negative emotionality), 21 were non-temperamentally matched both meeting < 3 BPD symptoms. Measures International Personality Disorder Examination (IPDE; Loranger, 1999); a clinician rater diagnostic semi-structured interview. The 9-item BPD subscale (scored 0-2) determines severity of BPD symptoms. Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ-SF; Bernstein et al., 2003); a self-report measure that assesses for type and severity of traumatic experiences in childhood. Method Faculty Advisor: Kenneth N. Levy, Graduate Advisor: Benjamin N. Johnson