ArticleBiological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging2020
Borderline Personality Traits Are Not Correlated With Brain Structure in Two Large Samples.
Article in Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Components of event-related potentials and borderline personality disorder: a meta-analysis.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2023Pooled it
- Grey matter volume associations with personality functioning in a clinical cohort of female youths.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2026Article
- Identifying impulsivity and substance use measures in neuroimaging datasets: A scoping review and searchable dataset repository for researchers.Current addiction reports · 2026Article
- Connectome caricatures remove large-amplitude coactivation patterns in resting-state fMRI to emphasize individual differences.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
- Leveraging normative personality data and machine learning to examine the brain structure correlates of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder traits.Journal of psychopathology and clinical science · 2024Article
- Generalizable Links Between Borderline Personality Traits and Functional Connectivity.Biological psychiatry · 2024Article
- The Genetically Informed Neurobiology of Addiction (GINA) model.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2023Review
- Borderline Personality Disorder: Updates in a Postpandemic World.Focus (American Psychiatric Publishing) · 2022Review
- Predictive models for social functioning in healthy young adults: A machine learning study integrating neuroanatomical, cognitive, and behavioral data.Social neuroscience · 2022Article
- Scan Once, Analyse Many: Using Large Open-Access Neuroimaging Datasets to Understand the Brain.Neuroinformatics · 2022Article
- The Impact of Personality Pathology Across Three Generations: Evidence from the St. Louis Personality and Intergenerational Network Study.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2021Article
- Investigating the neural substrates of Antagonistic Externalizing and social-cognitive Theory of Mind: an fMRI examination of functional activity and synchrony.Personality neuroscience · 2021Article
- Brain responses to social feedback in internalizing disorders: A comprehensive review.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2020Review
- An fMRI investigation of the relations between Extraversion, internalizing psychopathology, and neural activation following reward receipt in the Human Connectome Project sample.Personality neuroscience · 2020Article
- Tutorial: Power analyses for interaction effects in cross-sectional regressions.Advances in methods and practices in psychological scienceArticle
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Abstract
backgroundBorderline personality disorder is associated with severe psychiatric presentations and has been linked to variability in brain structure. Dimensional models of borderline personality traits (BPTs) have become influential; however, associations between BPTs and brain structure remain poorly understood.
methodsWe tested whether BPTs are associated with regional cortical thickness, cortical surface area, and subcortical volumes (n = 152 brain structure metrics) in data from the Duke Neurogenetics Study (n = 1299) and Human Connectome Project (n = 1099). Positive control analyses tested whether BPTs are associated with related behaviors (e.g., suicidal thoughts and behaviors, psychiatric diagnoses) and experiences (e.g., adverse childhood experiences).
resultsWhile BPTs were robustly associated with all positive control measures, they were not significantly associated with any brain structure metrics in the Duke Neurogenetics Study or Human Connectome Project, or in a meta-analysis of both samples. The strongest findings from the meta-analysis showed a positive association between BPTs and volumes of the left ventral diencephalon and thalamus (p values < .005 uncorrected, p values > .1 false discovery rate-corrected). Contrasting high and low BPT decile groups (n = 552) revealed no false discovery rate-significant associations with brain structure.
conclusionsWe find replicable evidence that BPTs are not associated with brain structure despite being correlated with independent behavioral measures. Prior reports linking brain morphology to borderline personality disorder may be driven by factors other than traits (e.g., severe presentations, comorbid conditions, severe childhood adversity, or medication) or reflect false positives. The etiology or consequences of BPTs may not be attributable to brain structure measured via magnetic resonance imaging. Future studies of BPTs will require much larger sample sizes to detect these very small effects.
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