Comparing personality dysfunction, maladaptive personality traits, and borderline personality disorder as models of emotion dysregulation in three adult samples.

Abstract

The categorical borderline personality disorder (BPD) diagnosis identifies people who struggle to manage negative emotions. As the field transitions to dimensional personality disorder (PD) models, it is important to know whether alternative diagnostic constructs capture emotion regulation difficulties to the same degree. If not, it may make sense to modify the dimensional models or else retain the BPD syndrome to preserve its incremental utility for clinical description, treatment planning, and prognosis. In three adult samples (total N = 1,197), we modeled self-rated emotion dysregulation as a function of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5) Alternative Model of Personality Disorder dimensions and traditional BPD features. We found that personality dysfunction had bivariate correlations with emotion dysregulation of .70-.80 across samples, almost identical to those observed for BPD. Combined, personality dysfunction and maladaptive personality traits explained 52%-73% of individual differences in emotion dysregulation. Controlling for Alternative Model of Personality Disorder constructs, a standalone measure of BPD features accounted for an additional 7%, 0.6%, and 1% of emotion-dysregulation variation across samples. We conclude that emotion dysregulation is better conceptualized as a general feature of the PD space, rather than a specific deficit in borderline or any other PD. We encourage additional investigation into ways that dimensional models of personality pathology relate to emotion dysregulation. The study's raw data and analysis code are available at https://osf.io/x9jbs/. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).