Heightened Salience of Anger and Aggression in Female Adolescents With Borderline Personality Disorder—A Script-Based fMRI Study

作者：Marlene Krauch, Kai Ueltzhöffer, Romuald Brunner, Michael Kaess, Saskia Hensel, Sabine C. Herpertz, Katja Bertsch · 发表于：Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience · 年份：2018 · DOI：10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00057 · 被引用次数：35 · 研究领域：Personality Disorders and Psychopathology、Psychosomatic Disorders and Their Treatments、Suicide and Self-Harm Studies

Background: Anger and aggression belong to the core symptoms of borderline personality disorder. Although an early and specific treatment of BPD is highly relevant to prevent chronification, still little is known about anger and aggression and their neural underpinnings in adolescents with BPD. Method: 20 female adolescents with BPD (age 15-17 years) and 20 female healthy adolescents (age 15-17 years) took part in this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. A script-driven imagery paradigm was used to induce rejection-based feelings of anger, which was followed by descriptions of self-directed and other directed aggressive reactions. To investigate the specificity of the neural activation patterns for adolescent patients, results were compared with data from 34 female adults with BPD (age 18-50 years) and 32 female healthy adults (age 18-50 years). Results: Adolescents with BPD showed increased activations in the left posterior insula and left dorsal striatum as well as in the left inferior frontal cortex and parts of the mentalizing network during the rejection-based anger induction and the imagination of aggressive reactions compared to healthy adolescents. For the other-directed aggression phase, a significant diagnosis by age interaction confirmed that these results were specific for adolescents. Discussion: The results of this very first fMRI study on anger and aggression in adolescents with BPD suggest an enhanced emotional reactivity to and higher effort i...