Emotional empathy
ambiguous social situations, BPD
Women with BPD showed lower emotional empathy than the control group in response to positive emotional stimuli (e.g., a person showing happiness), but not to negative stimuli. This was also significant after including current mood as a covariate into the analysis. In previous studies, our group did not find reduced emotional empathy in women with BPD in the control conditions, but valence was not taken into account [The finding that women with BPD scored lower on emotional empathy in both conditions might be due to a biased perception of ambiguous social situations. In our Cyberball game, co-players were represented by pictograms rather than real pictures, which prevented participants from reading facial expressions or emotions. There is evidence that patients with BPD anticipate social rejection or threat in such ambiguous social situations [