The Emotional Threads of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD): Using Emotion Concordance to Understand Intergenerational Transmission
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Authors
Ilyaz, Emma
Date
2025-02-05
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
Borderline personality disorder , Respiratory sinus arrhythmia , Multimodal emotion , Anger dysregulation
Alternative Title
Abstract
Offspring of parents with borderline personality disorder (BPD), in which anger and its dysregulation are cardinal symptoms, are at elevated risk of developing psychopathology. Despite knowledge that parents influence their children’s understanding of emotions and their management, the specific mechanistic components of this connection are not well understood. One way to start understanding this relationship may be to explore how parental anger dysregulation is characterized multimodally across emotion channels (e.g., subjective, and physiological) and how this pattern of anger dysregulation is related to both parent and child psychopathology symptoms. The current study focused on a convenience sample of 162 parents (Mage =40.37 years; SDage =7.25 years; 93% women; 47% racial/ethnic minority) of young adolescents oversampled for emotion dysregulation (Mage=12.59 years; SD age=.92 years; 47% women; 60% racial/ethnic minority). Parents’ BPD feature severity was measured using the semi-structured interview for DSM-IV Personality (SIDP-IV). Adolescents’ psychopathology symptoms were assessed using Childhood Behavior Checklist (CBCL). Respiratory sinus arrythmia (RSA) was used to understand parents’ parasympathetic nervous system activity. RSA reflects physiological regulation of arousal related to emotion. I used response surface modeling to understand how parents’ RSA (parasympathetic nervous system activity) and self-reported anger during a parent-child conflict task were related to parental BPD feature severity (Model 1) and child psychopathology severity (Model 2). I found that patterns of higher agreement between parental RSA and self-reported anger were associated with the lowest parental BPD feature severity (Model 1) and child psychopathology (Model 2), whereas greater mismatches, particularly patterns of low RSA coupled with high self-reported anger were related to higher parental BPD severity (Model 1) and higher child psychopathology severity (Model 2). These findings may have implications for understanding how parental anger dysregulation underlies the intergenerational transmission of psychopathology.
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ProQuest PhD and Master's Theses International Dissemination Agreement
Intellectual Property Guidelines at Queen's University
Copying and Preserving Your Thesis
This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International