Why Can’t People with Borderline Personality Find Joy?

The last time you were in a bad mood, how did you try to cheer yourself up? Perhaps you were out to dinner with a friend when the thought crossed your mind that you have a stressful day coming up tomorrow. You’re trying to distract yourself from this reminder, but it’s not proving to be easy. Fortunately, your friend starts in on an amusing anecdote, and your stress slips away.

For people with borderline personality disorder (BPD), the regulation of emotion doesn’t come quite so easily. In fact, emotion dysregulation is seen as a core feature of this longstanding maladaptive pattern. Feelings such as anger or sadness get out of control quickly, and may or may not come back down again for a while. Life would be far easier if individuals with this disorder could recalibrate once their emotional reactions start to run away from them.

Emotion Dysregulation as a Core Feature of Borderline Personality Disorder

According to a new study by Leiden University’s Annegret Krause-Utz and colleagues (2025), the “increased sensitivity to experience emotions more intensely that persist over time” is a key feature of BPD. Once these emotions start to develop, individuals with BPD are more likely to engage in maladaptive coping behaviors, including self-injury and suicidal behaviors (p. 211).

Prior research in this area has focused in intrapersonal emotion regulation strategies, meaning how people can use their own inner coping methods to cool things down. However, newer work in the emotion regulation field is starting to examine interpersonal strategies, meaning the ways that you can be helped by others in bringing your emotions under control. Much as what happened in the example with your friend, perhaps people with BPD could learn to draw on others to provide the regulation they may struggle with on their own.

Testing Interpersonal Emotion Regulation in BPD

Using an innovative experimental method to investigate interpersonal emotion regulation, Ute-Krause and her colleagues recruited a sample of 70 women, all of whom met at least some criteria for BPD. The task involved remembering a series of three letters for one second, followed by a delay of 1.5 seconds, and then another set of three letters (the “probe”) for two seconds. In half of the trials one of the original 3 letters was in the probe. Participants were instructed to push a “yes” or “no” button when looking at the probe to indicate whether it was in the original set of 3.

The emotion piece of the task came into play during the probe interval. In half the trials, participants saw a plus sign, and in the other half they saw a face. The faces were either happy, neutral, fearful, or angry. The idea was that participants were supposed to ignore the faces before making their response. The authors predicted that people with higher BPD symptoms would perform more poorly on the memory task.

In addition to completing measures of BPD symptoms, participants also responded to a questionnaire testing their use of interpersonal emotion regulation strategies (IERQ). This measure included 4 subscales assessing the following:

Enhancement of positive affect: Tendency to seek out others to increase feelings of happiness and joy.

Perspective-taking: Use of others to be reminded not to worry and that others have made it worse.

Social modeling: Looking to others to see how people might cope with a given situation.

Soothing: Seeking out others for comfort and joy.

As predicted, IERQ scores negatively reflected the degree of BPD symptoms, but particularly the strategy of enhancing positive affect. Also, better task performance on the memory task predicted better IERQ scores. However, this was true only for the trials with no distraction. The third major finding was that people with higher BPD symptoms made more errors in trials with faces as distractors, especially happy faces. The final result was that people with higher levels of BPD symptoms who used more interpersonal emotion strategies also performed better on the memory task (with no distractors).

The Leyden U. research team concluded that their findings “point to altered processing of positive social stimuli, possibly based on an altered valence or reward system in BPD” (p. 219). Turning to the implications for BPD’s origins, the authors also suggest that people with this personality disorder have learned to fear intimacy, not expecting that they will receive emotional help from others. Having been rejected in their early relationships, these individuals find it hard to rely on anyone to provide them with social support in general.

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What the Findings Mean for BPD

If you’re someone who easily allows other people to cheer you up, it may surprise you to learn that not everyone has this capacity. Furthermore, if you have someone in your life with BPD, you may already have noticed how hard it is to intervene when they’re having a bad day.

It’s particularly impressive to learn how much this difficulty in regulating emotions can interfere with cognitive processing. Perhaps the next time you’re having trouble concentrating, you might try to clear your head of whatever stresses are coming your way. It’s also helpful to know that you can rely on other people to assist you in this road back to equanimity.

To sum up, this new study sheds light on a feature of BPD not previously understood. By learning how individuals with this disorder could benefit from turning to others for help, you too can understand how better to cope with your own stress.