Borderline personality traits are associated with reduced coordination during a finger-tapping task

An experimental study conducted in Italy found that individuals with pronounced borderline personality traits tended to show greater asynchrony with a virtual partner in a finger-tapping task. They also perceived lower synchrony and reported more negative affect during the interaction. In other words, they both coordinated less effectively with a virtual partner and experienced the interaction as less coordinated. The paper was published in Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment.

Borderline personality traits are a pattern of emotional, interpersonal, and behavioral characteristics associated with borderline personality disorder but present to varying degrees in the general population. These traits include intense emotional reactivity, rapid mood shifts, and difficulty regulating negative emotions.

Individuals high in borderline personality traits tend to form unstable and intense interpersonal relationships in which they frequently shift between perceiving the other person as entirely positive and perfect or entirely negative and worthless. Fear of abandonment and heightened sensitivity to rejection are common features of these individuals.

Identity disturbance, such as an unstable or unclear sense of self, is frequently reported. They may act impulsively in areas such as spending or substance use and may show a heightened proneness to risky behavior. Many individuals with borderline personality traits experience chronic feelings of emptiness or inner instability.

Study author Camilla Gregorini and her colleagues note that individuals with high borderline personality traits might show difficulties in social cognitive processes that require them to align and coordinate their actions with other people and to functionally modulate their emotions. When humans do something together, they coordinate their movements, behaviors, and even physiological processes. This is called interpersonal synchronization, and it is one of the key mechanisms underlying the human ability to cooperate.

These authors conducted an experiment in which they used a finger-tapping task to explore whether high borderline personality traits might affect a person’s ability to synchronize with a partner. Coordinating with others requires a person to be able to flexibly plan and monitor one’s own and others’ actions and create a good balance between oneself and the partner. Study authors hypothesized that the emotional dysregulation and interpersonal instability of individuals with high borderline traits would produce difficulties in anticipating the actions of the partner and adapting to the partner’s actions, regardless of when and how the partner adapted.

Study participants were 206 individuals recruited from the general population in Italy. Of these participants, 130 were women. Their average age was 24 years.

Participants completed an assessment of borderline personality traits (the Personality Assessment Inventory – Borderline Scale). They also completed an experiment in which they interacted with a virtual partner with several levels of adaptivity in a finger-tapping task. The task required participants to tap the space bar on a keyboard so that they synchronized with tones played by the virtual partner.

Depending on the setting, the virtual partner adapted the timing of its tones to reduce the asynchrony produced by the participant’s taps. In that way, the virtual partner modulated the synchrony between itself and the participant. There were 5 levels of virtual partner adaptivity, ranging from non-adaptive to overly adaptive.

After the end of each condition, participants evaluated their perception of synchrony (“How much did you feel in sync with the virtual partner?”). They also evaluated their affect using the International Positive and Negative Affect Schedule Short Form. Additionally, study authors derived an objective measure of asynchrony between participants and their virtual partners as the time mismatch between each tap and each tone. Participants were not informed that their virtual partner had different adaptivity settings.

Results showed that individuals with more pronounced borderline personality traits tended to show greater asynchrony with the virtual partner. They also perceived lower synchrony and reported more negative affect. In other words, these individuals both coordinated less effectively with their virtual partner and experienced the interaction as less coordinated.

“Our results reveal that the interpersonal disturbances and emotional dysregulation related to individuals with high BPD [borderline personality disorder] traits might interfere with the social cognitive processes implicated in coordination processes. Consequently, such impairments might lead to higher asynchrony and a negative experience of synchrony,” study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of social interactions of individuals with pronounced borderline personality traits. However, it should be noted that the study utilized an interaction with a virtual partner, not a real person. Findings about interactions with real people might differ. Additionally, study participants were recruited from a nonclinical population; therefore, it is likely that, on average, their borderline personality trait levels were low.

The paper “Stable Asynchrony? Association Between Borderline Personality Traits and Interpersonal Asynchrony” was authored by Camilla Gregorini, Pietro De Carli, Laura Parolin, Marco Petilli, Ivana Konvalinka, and Emanuele Preti.