When Social Inclusion Is Not Enough: Implicit Expectations of Extreme Inclusion in Borderline Personality Disorder

Increasing evidence suggests that individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) might feel rejected even when socially included by others. A psychological mechanism accounting for this response bias could be that objective social inclusion violates BPD patients' underlying implicit needs of "extreme" inclusion. Thus, this study investigated whether, during interpersonal exchanges, BPD patients report more rejection-related negative emotions and less feelings of social connection than controls unless they are faced with conditions of extreme social inclusion. Sixty-one BPD patients and 61 healthy controls completed a modified Cyberball paradigm. They were randomly assigned to a condition of ostracism, social inclusion, or overinclusion (a proxy for extreme social inclusion). They then rated their emotional states and feelings of social connection immediately and 20 min after the game. BPD patients reported greater levels of negative emotions than controls in the ostracism and the inclusion conditions, but not when overincluded. Furthermore, only for BPD participants was overinclusion associated with experiencing less negative emotions than the ostracism condition. However, BPD patients reported lower feelings of social connection than controls in any experimental situation. Thus, in BPD, a laboratory condition of "overinclusion" is associated with a reduction of negative emotions to levels comparable to those of control participants, but not with similar degrees of social connection. These results suggest that for BPD patients, even "including contexts" activate feelings of rejection. Their implicit expectations of idealized interpersonal inclusion may nullify the opportunity of experiencing "real" social connection and explain their distorted subjective experiences of rejection.