Attend or Avoid? Attentional Threat Bias, Theta/Beta Ratio, and Borderline Personality Disorder Features: A Pilot Study

Attentional threat bias (ATB) is thought to play a key role in mental health conditions such as borderline personality disorder (BPD). Yet, research on ATB in BPD has yielded inconsistent findings, and the mechanisms underlying their relationship remain unclear. The relationship between BPD features, ATB, and the theta/beta ratio (TBR), an electroencephalography (EEG) measure thought to reflect cortical-subcortical interactions, was explored in this pilot study. Using a convenience sample of nine healthy participants, we conducted exploratory analyses and evaluated methodological approaches. A novel ATB task was developed and tested for internal consistency, addressing psychometric and methodological limitations in prior research. The task included neutral and threatening image pairs from the international affective picture system (IAPS), and we evaluated potential perceptual confounds and affective ratings of these images. The ATB task demonstrated excellent internal consistency,...Show moreAttentional threat bias (ATB) is thought to play a key role in mental health conditions such as borderline personality disorder (BPD). Yet, research on ATB in BPD has yielded inconsistent findings, and the mechanisms underlying their relationship remain unclear. The relationship between BPD features, ATB, and the theta/beta ratio (TBR), an electroencephalography (EEG) measure thought to reflect cortical-subcortical interactions, was explored in this pilot study. Using a convenience sample of nine healthy participants, we conducted exploratory analyses and evaluated methodological approaches. A novel ATB task was developed and tested for internal consistency, addressing psychometric and methodological limitations in prior research. The task included neutral and threatening image pairs from the international affective picture system (IAPS), and we evaluated potential perceptual confounds and affective ratings of these images. The ATB task demonstrated excellent internal consistency, but limited variability in ATB scores restricted interpretability. TBR did not significantly mediate the relationship between BPD features and ATB, and perceptual or affective features of the IAPS stimuli are unlikely explanations for the null findings.Show less

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Attend or Avoid? Attentional Threat Bias, Theta/Beta Ratio, and Borderline Personality Disorder Features: A Pilot Study