- Title
- When I look into my baby's eyes...emotion recognition of infant face stimuli by mothers with Borderline Personality Disorder
- Creator
- Elliott, Rickie-Leigh
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- Professional Doctorate - Doctor of Clinical Psychology (DCP)
- Description
- Background: Sensitive emotional interaction with one’s parent during infancy is recognised as fundamental to healthy infant cognitive, social, emotional and physical development. Mothers with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) are known to have disturbed relationships with their infant(s), characterised by high levels of maternal stress, low parental self-efficacy, intrusiveness, hostility, avoidance, and in some cases, abuse. These relational difficulties may be related to problems perceiving their infant’s nonverbal emotional cues. Previous studies have found impaired facial emotion recognition in individuals with BPD using adult face stimuli; however, the exact nature of this abnormality is not yet established. No research has examined the ability of mothers with BPD to accurately identify their infant’s facial expressions of emotion. In light of the plethora of research highlighting the social and emotional disturbances associated with BPD, this research is important for furthering scientific understanding of the socio-emotional deficits underlying the disorder, and to identify targets for treatment and remediation in at-risk mother-infant dyads. Scope: This research extends existing knowledge by examining face emotion recognition ability in women with BPD using adult face stimuli of varying emotional intensities, and is the first to use novel infant face emotion stimuli to examine the relationship between infant emotion perception and key clinical and parenting variables associated with BPD. Purpose: The purpose of this research is to examine emotion recognition performance in women with BPD and the underlying mechanisms associated with emotion recognition disturbances observed previously in this group. Study 1 will focus on adult face perception and processing. The eye movements (visual scanpaths) of participants will be recorded while they view adult face emotion stimuli to examine visuo-cognitive performance. Affect recognition will be assessed concurrently. Study 2 will focus on infant face emotion recognition accuracy using the women’s own, as well as unknown, infant face images depicting three emotions (happy, sad and neutral) to examine relationships between infant face emotion recognition and key clinical and parental variables associated with BPD. Methodology: The total sample consisted of 14 women diagnosed with BPD and 16 control women. Women were recruited from parenting and mental health services within Hunter New England Area Health Service (HNEAHS). The women participated in Study 1 and 2 concurrently, and completed two assessment phases within each study. Of this sample, 14 women diagnosed with BPD and 16 control women participated in Study 1. In Phase One of this study, participants completed a clinical assessment and a set of self-report questionnaires. In Phase Two, approximately one month after completing Phase One, participants completed two visual scanpath tasks: the Adult Emotion Recognition Task (AERT) and the Adult Emotion Intensity Task (AEIT). In the AERT, stimuli consisted of male and female adult posers depicting one of five emotions (angry, sad, happy, fearful and neutral). In the AEIT, stimuli consisted of male and female adult images depicting happy, sad, neutral, angry or fearful expressions at varying intensity levels of 20%, 60%, 80%, and 100%. Affect recognition was assessed concurrently in both tasks using verbal report by participants. In Study 2, the sample consisted of 13 mothers diagnosed with BPD and 13 healthy control mothers who completed both the clinical and parenting questionnaires and the infant emotion recognition task (IERT) that comprised images of the mothers’ own, as well as unknown (control), infant faces depicting happy, neutral and sad expressions. Results: In Study 1, participants with BPD were found to be significantly less accurate in overall face emotion recognition ability than controls, but not so for visual scanpath performance where they performed similarly to controls, suggesting that emotion recognition deficits in BPD are not associated with an underlying facial information processing impairment. Some tentative support was also observed for a negative misattribution bias in the BPD group for neutral expressions, which were more often reported as being sad, followed equally by angry and fear. However, this trend dissipated after more rigorous follow-up analyses. In Study two examining infant face emotion recognition, mothers with BPD were found to display significantly poorer overall infant emotion recognition accuracy compared to control mothers. Recognition of neutral facial expressions provided greatest between-group discrimination, with mothers with BPD displaying significantly poorer accuracy for neutral infant expressions, negatively misattributing neutral for sad in the majority of cases. However, unexpectedly, the negative misattribution was not associated with key clinical and parenting variables in this cohort, although mothers’ age and duration of the BPD were related, suggesting that chronicity of illness, rather than severity of symptoms, impacted greatest on mothers’ perceptions of infants’ emotions. As expected, mothers with BPD did not show enhanced accuracy for recognising their own infant’s emotions compared with that of unknown infants. However, in contrast to expectations and previous literature, the healthy control mothers in this study also did not demonstrate enhanced accuracy when viewing their own infant’s emotions. General Conclusions and Implications: The findings from this research (both Study 1 and 2) show that while women with BPD have impaired emotion recognition ability, their visual processing of facial information appears intact. The research findings also highlight an important trend of negative misattribution of neutral affect in women with BPD, which may have significant impact on their parenting of infants, perhaps perceiving them to display more negative emotions than they actually do. Older mothers with greater BPD chronicity are particularly vulnerable and the findings highlight the need for both further research and early intervention in this sub-group of mothers with BPD. The development of specific remediative interventions that target infant face recognition deficits in mothers with chronic BPD with the aim of improving the outcomes for at risk mother-infant dyads are required.
- Subject
- Borderline Personality Disorder; infant face perception; emotion recognition accuracy
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1039283
- Identifier
- uon:13634
- Rights
- Copyright 2013 Rickie-Leigh Elliott
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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