41-5 Love You or Hate You-Interpersonal Intimacy Competence in the Patients with Borderline Personality
Borderline personality disorder (BPD), the most common type of personality disorder encountered in clinical practice, manifests in impairment of social interactions and interpersonal relationships. Past insecure attachments may cause interpersonal relationships to break down and negative interpretations to develop, which in turn may lead to more severe conflicts. The aim of the present study is to assess the factors of depression, empathy, and emotional awareness that affect interpersonal intimacy in patients with BPD as compared to controls, and to explore whether different patterns of factors cause the impairments of interpersonal intimacy in patients with BPD. Thirty patients diagnosed with BPD by psychiatrists and thirty healthy subjects in the comparison group participated in the study. Subjects were assessed with the assessment of separation-individual inventory, interpersonal competence questionnaire (ICQ), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II), interpersonal reactivity index (IRI), and levels of emotional awareness scale (LEAS). The ICQ includes five subscales: initiation, negative assertion, disclosure, emotional support, and conflict management. The IRI includes four subscales: perspective taking (PT), fantasy (FS), personal distress (PD), and empathic concern (EC). The results showed that scores on empathy, emotional awareness, depression, and interpersonal intimacy were lower in patients than in controls. Regression analysis showed that lower performance in PT may explain the impairment of interpersonal intimacy in patients with BPD. Thus, our results suggest that strengthening the ability of perspective taking may help to improve the interpersonal relationships of patients with BPD.
Keywords
borderline personality disorder ； emotional awareness scale ； empathy ； interpersonal competence questionnaire
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