Individual differences in components of impulsivity and effortful control moderate the relation between borderline personality disorder traits and emotion recognition in a sample of university students

Dysfunctions in social cognition characterize personality disorders. However, mixed results emerged from literature on emotion processing. Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) traits are either associated with enhanced emotion recognition, impairments, or equal functioning compared to controls. These apparent contradictions might result from the complexity of emotion recognition tasks used and from individual differences in impulsivity and effortful control. We conducted a study in a sample of undergraduate students (n=80), assessing BPD traits, using an emotion recognition task that requires the processing of only visual information or both visual and acoustic information. We also measured individual differences in impulsivity and effortful control. Results demonstrated the moderating role of some components of impulsivity and effortful control on the capability of BPD traits in predicting anger and happiness recognition. We organized the discussion around the interaction between different components of regulatory functioning and task complexity for a better understanding of emotion recognition in BPD samples. •We use a dynamic emotion recognition task, with unimodal and multimodal conditions.•BPD traits alone do not predict emotion recognition performances.•Specific subscales of Effortful control and Impulsivity moderate the predictive validity of BPD traits.•Individual differences in different components of regulatory processes should be considered in the study of emotion recognition in BPD.