When trust does not come easily: Negative emotional information unduly influences trustworthiness appraisals for individuals with borderline personality features

Abstract

Individuals with borderline personality disorder and subclinical borderline features perceive others as untrustworthy (e.g., Fertuck, Grinband, & Stanley, 2013). Trust difficulties may be influenced by emotional state and are formally articulated in the diagnostic criteria for the disorder as temporary state-dependent paranoia. The current study examines the influence of emotional information on trustworthiness appraisals. Seventy-seven community adults, ranging in age from 18 to 70 (M = 31.53, SD = 14.01), with three or more borderline personality disorder symptoms (n = 30) or two or fewer symptoms (n = 47), completed an affective priming paradigm. They were exposed to negative, neutral, or positive information before rating the trustworthiness of unfamiliar faces. Individuals with borderline pathology made more untrusting appraisals regardless of prime, and they were more greatly influenced by negative primes relative to the control group. Findings suggest that biased trustworthiness appraisal is a replicable and consistent finding for individuals with borderline pathology, and that emotional context, even if unrelated to the appraisal at hand, has undue influence.