Patients diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have disturbed interpersonal relationships and emotional dysregulation. However, it remains uncertain whether these patients are also deficient at processing other people´s emotions. The initial appraisal of emotional information (involving attention and interpretation of emotional cues) is viewed as one essential precursor to emotional response and may relate to emotional dysregulation in borderline individuals.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the differences in the recognition of facial expressions of emotion and to investigate the pattern of classification errors among a group diagnosed with BPD, compared to a non-patient control group.

40 outpatients diagnosed with BPD, and 91 control subjects completed the Picture of Facial Affect developed by P. Ekman (POFA, 1976), a computerized emotion discrimination test presenting 110 photographs of evoked happy, sad, anger, fear, surprised, disgust and neutral expressions using a fixed-response format.

We found significant differences in the patterns of error rates in POFA tests related to identifying emotions with a negative valence as well as in neutral expression responses between both groups.

Results are discussed in terms of emotional appraisal ability and dysregulation among individuals with BPD. Examining the predictive factors of emotional responding in borderline individuals may provide information on the nature of emotion dysregulation in this population.