Emotional learning during dissociative states in borderline personality disorder.
Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience May 1, 2009 U. Ebner-Priemer, Jana Mauchnik, N. Kleindienst et al.
Patients with borderline personality disorder who experience high levels of dissociative symptoms show diminished emotional learning during aversive conditioning, as measured by skin conductance responses, compared to patients without dissociation and healthy controls. The dissociative group showed no increase in valence or arousal to the conditioned stimulus and no differential skin conductance responses during acquisition or extinction phases. These differences were not explained by general psychopathology, trauma history, perceptual differences, or posttraumatic stress disorder. The findings suggest that state dissociation inhibits amygdala-based emotional learning processes, which may have implications for exposure-based psychotherapy.