Attachment and Borderline Personality Disorder: Differential Effects on Situational Socio-Affective Processes
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Attachment and Borderline Personality Disorder: Differential Effects on Situational Socio-Affective Processes Aleksandra Kaurin 1 & Joseph E. Beeney 2 & Stephanie D. Stepp 2 & Lori N. Scott 2 & William C. Woods 1 & Paul A. Pilkonis 2 & Aidan G.C. Wright 1 Received: 19 December 2019 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 / Published online: 18 September 2020 # The Society for Affective Science 2020
Abstract Insecure attachment and borderline personality disorder (BPD) are defined by similar affective and interpersonal processes. Individuals diagnosed with BPD, however, represent only a subset of those described as insecurely attached, suggesting that attachment may hold broader relevance for socio-affective functioning. Based on a 21-day ecological momentary assessment protocol in a mixed clinical and community sample (N = 207) oversampled for BPD, we evaluate the discriminant validity of each construct as it influences daily interpersonal interactions. We find that insecure attachment is associated with elevated perceptions of interpersonal disaffiliation and maladaptive strategies for affect regulation, whereas enacted interpersonal hostility is more distinctive for BPD. In a series of sensitivity analyses, we further highlight potential caveats to these findings when studying both constructs concurrently. Together, our results suggest that both insecure attachment and BPD contribute to problematic affective and interpersonal processes, but that they do so at different stages of the unfolding social interaction, which has important implications for their maintenance and treatment. Keywords Attachment . Borderline personality disorder . Ambulatory assessment . Multilevel structural equation modeling . Daily socio-affective processes
Perceptions of interpersonal disaffiliation, poor emotion regulation, and disrupted relationship experiences are central to both the construct of insecure attachment and the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD; Agrawal et al., 2004). Theoretical accounts of BPD emphasize the role of disrupted early relations in its etiology and progression (Meyer & Pilkonis, 2004; Linehan, 2018). However, only a subgroup of those described as insecurely attached develops symptoms of BPD (Lyons-Ruth et al., 2005), implicating partially, but
Handling Editor: David Almeida Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-020-00017-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Aleksandra Kaurin [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
2
Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
not fully, overlapping interpersonal and affective liabilities (Levy & Blatt, 1999). To address this issue of conceptual redundancy, we evaluated the shared and distinctive contributions of insecure attachment and BPD features to socioaffective processes that characterize interpersonal interactions in daily life in a mixed clinica
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