| Popis: |
Individuals who have features of borderline personality disorder (BPD) often show emotion regulation difficulties (i.e., emotion lability). They also often adopt avoidance tendencies (Cheavans et al., 2005), which may explain the emotion awareness deficits reported in the literature for that population (e.g., Leible & Snell, 2004). One awareness deficit that these individuals may experience is a difficulty knowing how they feel in the in the present moment. The current study assesses this lack of emotion awareness in young adults through semantic infusion and emotion differentiation. This deficit may affect the ability of individuals with borderline features to effectively regulate their emotions. Being mindful, on the other hand, is theoretically related to being aware of emotional experiences (e.g., Bishop et al., 2004). Because being mindful is to be in the present moment (Brown & Ryan, 2003), mindfulness is likely to be associated to awareness of the present moment. 96 young adults participated in a lab-based and experience sampling study that assessed how mindfulness and borderline tendencies were associated with emotional lability and aspects of emotional awareness. Findings of this study appear to indicate that mindfulness is a good predictor of emotional awareness. Borderline features were related to more lability and less mindfulness tendencies. Mindfulness was related to greater emotion differentiation; however, borderline features were not. Contrary to expectation, borderline features were associated to lower negative semantic infusion while mindfulness revealed greater negative semantic infusion. The findings regarding semantic infusion, however, are to be interpreted with caution, as this measure may not strictly measure awareness of the present moment. |
