Memory functioning in borderline personality disorder

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by extreme instability of affect, behavior, and cognition. Clinical anecdotes depict individuals who tend to experience abandonment, rejection, and negative evaluation in the behavior of other people, even in the absence of objective cues of that nature. The purpose of this research is to understand the cognitive and information-processing underpinnings of this clinical phenomenon. The present study was an exploration of potential memory deficits and affective memory biases in individuals with BPD. Three groups of study participants took part in the study: (1) outpatient individuals with BPD ;Memory impairment was examined using the Wechsler Memory Scale - Revised, a standard battery of memory tasks. BPD subjects in this sample did display memory deficits relative to controls on three WMS-R subtests (Visual Paired Associates-Immediate and Visual Memory Span, and Visual Reproduction-Delayed).;A directed forgetting paradigm was used to determine whether individuals with BPD showed memory biases for salient stimuli. Study participants were exposed to three types of words (borderline, neutral, positive) and were cued to either remember or to forget each word as it was presented. On free recall, participants with BPD recalled significantly more of the borderline words from the "forget" condition than did controls. In other words, BPD participants remembered borderline words that they were instructed to forget. These results may be consistent with enhanced encoding of salient words and perhaps, related themes, in BPD individuals.;An autobiographical memory task was used to determine whether individuals with BPD show deficits in their ability to retrieve specific personal memories. Recall of personal memories was found to be impaired in BPD subjects on this task relative to controls. In addition, themes of abandonment, rejection, and negative evaluation emerged in the memories of BPD subjects and not in the memories of control subjects.;The findings suggest that individuals with BPD may have subtle deficits in memory for complex visual stimuli, and they may show biased information-processing of negatively valenced stimuli related themes presumed to be salient in this population.