A Study On The Characteristics Of Autonomous Neurological Activity Of College Students With Marginal Personality

Borderline personality disorder is characterized by affective instability, impulsivity, identity diffusion, and interpersonal dysfunction, which is a serious and complex mental disorder. Borderline personality disorder is also very common clinically and very difficult to cure. Not only has BPD brought the serious influence on the patients’life and the normal development, but also brought great emotional and economic burden to the individuals, families and society. The increasing of life pressure makes students groups in high-risk state, especially in mental disorders or mental illness. Among multiple personality disorder problems, higher probability exists with higher risk of suffering from borderline personality disorder in the college students. Therefore, it is of great importance to explore the influence factors and its pathological mechanism of BPD for the prevention and treatment of borderline personality disorder.Existing research mostly elucidated the psychological social factors from the perspective of individual psychology, family, social environment which affects the formation of BPD. There are few domestic studies from the perspective of neurophysiology examination of BPD’s etiology mechanisms. Therefore, this study were conducted to examine the characteristics of autonomic nervous system activity in college students with higher borderline personality features from the perspective of polyvagal theory, trying to prove that individuals with higher borderline personality characteristics had high biological vulnerability.This study first made Chinese revision of "the Personality Assessment Inventory-Borderline Features (PAI-BOR) Scale", as screening instrument in the college students’ groups with high or low borderline personality features. In this study, an impromptu interview pressure task was chose as challenges task inducing physiological responses.Then, this research adopted the questionnaire of PAI-BOR Scale, according to certain criteria, to select the groups with higher and lower borderline personality features of participants, a total of66people attended the physical experiment research.We examined autonomic activity before, during, and after a stressful task with individuals whose borderline personality features scores were at different levels. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), skin conductance response (SCR), and self-report measures were collected throughout the experiment. With respiratory sinus as indices of parasympathetic activity, skin conductance response as the index of the sympathetic nerve activity.The study found that participants with higher BP features exhibited significantly lower RSA than the individual with lower BP features in the baseline period and recovery period, in pressure task period, skin conductance response of higher borderline personality characteristics of individual were significantly higher than that of low borderline personality characteristics of individual. In the whole experimental stage, the task period RSA level was lower than the baseline period and recovery period, the task period skin conductance level and heart rate were higher than the baseline period and recovery period.The results suggested that individual with higher BP features has lower parasympathetic activity and higher sympathetic activity model, show that the people with borderline personality tendency is insufficient in the physiological regulation ability, having physical vulnerability. The results verify the polyvagal theory once again.