The comparison of hot and cold executive functions in patients with bipolar II disorder, borderline personality disorder, and healthy individuals

Abstract

Differential diagnosis of bipolar II disorder (BD-II) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) has always been challenging for clinicians due symptoms’ overlap. This study aimed to compare hot and cold executive functions (EFs) in BDII patients, BPD and healthy controls (HCs) in order to differentiate these two disorders. In the present study, 30 BDII and 30 BPD patients, undergoing the drug therapy with mood stabilizers, and 30 HC were examined using EFs evaluated tests. The data were then analyzed with the use of ANOVA and Tukey post hoc test. The BD-II Patients had significantly lower performance in all of the cold EFs than the HC. Also, BPD Patients had meaningfully lesser performance compared to HC in all cold EFs except the sustained attention. No significant difference was perceived between the two patient groups in the cold EFs. In BD-II patients, the risky decision-making as a hot EFs’ component was not significantly different from HC; nevertheless, its amount was significantly higher in BPD than the HC and BD-II patients. These findings underline the differences between two mentioned disorders based on the hot EFs, which may indicate further disorder in emotional information processing system among the BPD patients.