Tell Me about yourself: Analyzing self-referential language use in borderline personality disorder

Depression and some other illnesses are associated with increased self-reference and negative emotion in language. Research findings on lexical patterns in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have been inconsistent. We conducted two studies to evaluate lexical markers of distress in BPD: First compared to healthy controls (HC), and later compared to Post-Traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients and trauma-exposed controls (TC).

Study 1 compared language use in BPD (n = 23) to HC (n = 22). Study 2 featured a new sample comprised of 4 subgroups: BPD (n = 26), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD; n = 17), comorbid BPD + PTSD (n = 22), and one non-psychiatric trauma control group (TC; n = 29). All participants responded to a standardized prompt from an interviewer and language was analyzed using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) software to assess for self-referential language, negative emotion words, and physical words, as well as several other language signatures of interest.

No consistent significant between-group differences were found for LIWC categories of self-reference, negative emotion, or physical words, though negative tone words were significantly more frequent in BPD than non-psychiatric controls in both studies. There were also no consistent differences in sample length (either talking time or word count) or social measures across studies.

These data suggest that there are fewer lexical markers of distress in BPD language samples compared to previously reported depression and physical illness samples. Future work using longitudinal approaches to define changes in emotional and cognitive states will be important to clarify the disorder- and state-specificity of lexical markers.