TITLE:
Cognitive and Mood Functioning in Borderline and Schizotypal Personality Disorders
AUTHORS:
Kim E. Goldstein, Heather A. Berlin, Holly K. Hamilton, Effie M. Mitsis, Margaret M. McClure, Kimberley R. Savage, Nicholas J. Blair, Michelle R. Feder, Larry J. Siever, Antonia S. New, Erin A. Hazlett
KEYWORDS:
Neuropsychology, Neurocognition, Short-Term Visual Memory, Emotion, CANTAB, Personality
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.7 No.3,
March
16,
2016
ABSTRACT: Research suggests many shared clinical
features across individuals with Schizotypal Personality Disorder (SPD) and
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), including problems with attention/
executive functioning and mood. Therefore, aspects of these areas of
functioning were compared in SPD and BPD to better characterize their
respective difficulties. BPD, SPD, and healthy control (HC) participants were
administered measures of cognitive and mood functioning. Compared with healthy
controls, SPD patients performed significantly worse on aspects of the
Delayed-Matching- to-Sample task, a measure of short-term visual memory
abilities; however, the individuals with BPD did not differ from healthy
controls. Neither of the patient groups differed from HC’s on measures of
processing speed or planning. With regard to mood functioning, the BPD group
exhibited significantly higher levels of affective disturbance (e.g., sadness,
fear, anger) compared with the SPD patients and HCs. Overall, findings suggest
different patterns of fronto-subcortical weakness in each patient group. While
SPD patients exhibited relative weakness with short-term memory, BPD patient
performance on such measures did not reveal relative weakness compared with HCs
but did implicate problems with mood.