Introduction
borderline personality disorder, HC, BPD
DISORDER
Unstable interpersonal relationships and fear of abandonment are among the defining and most debilitating symptoms of borderline personality disorder (BPD; [Many of the disorder’s core symptoms typically occur in interpersonal contexts [In line with results of other studies showing enhanced prosocial behavior [In another study, pharmacological stimulation of the mineralocorticoid receptor (MR), one of the cortisol receptors in the brain, resulted in increased emotional empathy in healthy controls (HC) but also in patients with BPD [An experimental task frequently used to study social exclusion is the Cyberball paradigm [While one of the TSST’s main purposes is to induce a cortisol increase, most studies have shown no cortisol increase after Cyberball (e.g., [The aim of the present study was to investigate why patients with BPD differ in their emotional empathy response to psychosocial stress from healthy controls. In our model, we assume that the inhibition of prosocial behavior seen in patients with BPD is related to a feeling of social exclusion. Therefore, we used Cyberball to induce social exclusion without confounding of a cortisol increase. Subsequently, participants underwent the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET) as a measure of cognitive and emotional empathy.We expected no changes in cortisol or alpha-amylase release after the Cyberball game in women with BPD and healthy women. We hypothesized that women with BPD and HC would not differ in cognitive and emotional empathy in the control condition (overinclusion). In contrast, we expected that social exclusion would result in enhanced emotional empathy in HC and reduced emotional empathy in patients with BPD.