Conclusion and outlook
BPD
We conclude that women with BPD do not differ from healthy women in cognitive empathy and that this is not influenced by stress in general and social exclusion in particular. Emotional empathy, on the other hand, seems to be more sensitive to the effects of stress or ambiguous social situations in women with BPD. Specifically, emotional empathy seems to be reduced for positive emotions, and might further decline after social exclusion. Given these results, empathic reactions to emotional stimuli of different valences and to specific emotions should be further investigated. Future studies investigating the effects of social exclusion should use ecologically more valid Cyberball paradigms for example with virtual reality or a partial exclusion manipulation to increase believability. Next to social exclusion, other components of the TSST, such as social evaluation, one of the TSST’s most stressful components [