The core symptom in the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder is affect dysregulation. Patients show marked impulsivity, frequent mood swings, unstable relationships, and selfdestructive tendencies.
Another particular feature is the ability to identify negative and positive emotions very quickly.
Because of their high sensitivity to emotional expressions, borderline patients can detect even subtle expressions of emotions.
Like the depressed sample, these patients achieved lower overall emotional intelligence scores than nonclinical controls.
Compared with non-disordered individuals they were less skilled at understanding emotional information.
This result is in accord with the fact that those patients experience various emotions simultaneously, but have problems in separating and identifying those emotions.
Results also confirmed our hypothesis that the patients would have difficulties in regulating emotions.
It can be assumed that poor understanding of the meaning of emotions handicaps a person in regulating mood (Mayer & Salovey, 1997).
Surprisingly, the patients did not achieve above average results in emotion perception. We reason that this is due to the fact that time was not controlled.
We assume that in situations with time pressure, the patients should excel.