TY  - JOUR
A1  - Krauch, Marlene
A1  - Ueltzhöffer, Kai
A1  - Brunner, Romuald
A1  - Kaess, Michael
A1  - Hensel, Saskia
A1  - Herpertz, Sabine
A1  - Bertsch, Katja
T1  - Heightened salience of anger and aggression in female adolescents with borderline personality disorder-a script-based fMRI study
T2  - Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience
N2  - 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: Twenty 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 in controlling anger and aggression evoked by social rejection at an early developmental stage of the disorder. Since emotion dysregulation is a known mediator for aggression in BPD, the results point to the need of appropriate early interventions for adolescents with BPD.
KW  - anger
KW  - aggression
KW  - emotion regulation
KW  - borderline personality disorder
KW  - adolescence
KW  - social threat sensitivity
KW  - functional magnetic resonance imaging
KW  - group x age interaction
Y1  - 2018
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/46302
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-463029
SN  - 1662-5153
N1  - Copyright: © 2018 Krauch, Ueltzhöffer, Brunner, Kaess, Hensel, Herpertz and Bertsch. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
VL  - 12
IS  - Art. 57
SP  - 1
EP  - 11
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  -