Rejection Distress Suppresses Medial Prefrontal Cortex in Borderline Personality Disorder.

Background: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by an elevated distress response to social exclusion (i.e., rejection distress), the neural mechanisms of which remain unclear.

Trustworthiness appraisal deficits in borderline personality disorder are associated with prefrontal cortex, not amygdala, impairment.

Background: Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is associated with sensitivity to signals of interpersonal threats and misplaced trust in others. The amygdala, an integral part of the threat evaluation and response network, responds to both fear- and trust-related stimuli in non-clinical samples, and is more sensitive to emotional stimuli in BPD compared to controls. However, it is unknown whether the amygdalar response can account for deficits of trust and elevated sensitivity to interpersonal threat in BPD.