Inhibitory control under emotional contexts in women with borderline personality disorder: An electrophysiological study

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by emotional dysregulation and difficulties in cognitive control. Inhibitory control, meanwhile, is modulated by the presence of emotional stimuli. The objective of the present study was to examine the effects of implicit emotional contexts on response inhibition in BPD patients. Participants performed a response inhibition task (Go-NoGo) under 3 background context conditions: neutral, pleasant and unpleasant. Behavioral performance did not differed between groups. Significantly higher P3NoGo amplitudes, shorter N2 latencies and lower global connectivity were observed in the patients regardless of the emotional valence of the background images compared to controls. In addition, higher P3NoGo amplitudes were correlated with more pronounced psychopathological symptoms. Emotional contexts enhanced N2 amplitudes compared to neutral ones in both groups. Results indicate that BPD required greater neural effort to successfully perform the inhibitory task. Finally, BPD showed lower synchronization between cortical regions, which may indicate a disruption in the effective temporal coupling of distributed areas associated with emotional stimuli processing during both response and response inhibition.