Neurocognitive function in borderline personality disorder.

A battery of neuropsychological measures considered sensitive to dysfunction in prefrontal or temporal cortices was administered to patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and healthy controls. BPD patients exhibited striking deficits on measures of nonverbal executive function and nonverbal memory but were unimpaired on tests of alternation learning, response inhibition, divergent thinking, verbal fluency, and verbal working memory. A second study found that university students obtaining high scores on a self-report measure of BPD symptoms exhibited a similar pattern of neuropsychological impairment, although performance deficits were much less pronounced in the student sample. Taken together, these studies suggest that dysfunction of a right hemisphere frontotemporal regions may be associated with borderline personality.