2 - (SYM 56)Enhanced Emotion Processing Following Exposure to Fear Stimuli in Young Adults with BPD: Applications of Drift Diffusion Models and Bayesian Distributional Regression Models to Task Behavior

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) affects 1-2% of people and is associated with myriad negative life outcomes, including suicide. Interpersonal difficulties are a core area of impairment in the disorder, and there has been increasing interest in understanding processes – including biases in face emotion processing– that give rise to these difficulties.

Results from studies of face emotion processing widely vary: Whereas some research suggests enhanced face emotion identification in BPD, other studies show decreased performance or find that effects depend on context. One limitation of these studies is the near exclusive use of summary statistics of task behavior to characterize alterations in face emotion processing. Summary statistics suffer from poor reliability. Drift diffusion models (DDMs) overcome this limitation of summary statistics and provide additional insight into the component processes that produce behavior.

Once subjectwise DDM parameter estimates have been obtained, it is common practice to correlate these parameters with an individual difference variable of interest. Crucially, this two-step approach does not account for the uncertainty in the DDM parameter estimates. Bayesian distributional regression modeling provides a solution to this issue by directly modeling uncertainty of the parameter estimates.  

Here, we illustrate an application of DDM and distributional models to a study face emotion processing in BPD. Adolescents and young adults with (N = 45) and without (N = 41) BPD symptoms completed a task in which they needed to ignore an emotional distracter to identify the emotion displayed by the target image. Consistent with the broader literature on conflict adaptation, speed of evidence accumulation increased following incongruent trials. We also found that efficiency of evidence of accumulation increased following congruent trials in which the target image displayed fear. This effect was particularly pronounced in young adults with BPD symptoms (B = 0.014, 95% CI [0.001, 0.028]). We consider the implications of these findings and discuss how methodological choices in analyzing task behavior shape inferences.