Findings from analyses on positive emotion regulation showed no predictive relationship between BPF and helpful or unhelpful positive emotion regulation strategies after controlling for demographics, mood disturbance and cluster B personality scores. This finding may be interpreted as an indication that emotion regulation problems associated with BPF are not related to positive emotion regulation processes. However, removal of mood disturbance scores as control variables in the model indicated that individuals with high levels of BPF were reporting the use of significantly more unhelpful strategies and less helpful positive emotion regulation. This suggests that problematic positive emotion regulation in relation to BPF may be the result of a more general mood disturbance. This interpretation contradicts recent research, which reports that after controlling for co-morbid mood disorder, individuals with a diagnosis of BPD demonstrate increased use of the unhelpful strategy positive emotion suppression(Beblo et al., 2013). The difference in findings between the current study and Beblo et al. (2013) may be explained by the different techniques used to control depression and anxiety. Beblo et al. (2013) did not directly measure levels of depression but noted that the majority of the BPD sample also had a diagnosis of major depressive disorder (MDD) or an anxiety disorder. In order to eliminate the effects of co-morbidity, participants with a co-morbid diagnosis were removed and the analyses
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were repeated, revealing equivalent results. However, it may be that the remaining sub- sample (n=11) demonstrated high levels of depression and anxiety, which fell short of diagnostic thresholds. Therefore it could be that it was sub threshold features of depression and anxiety rather than BPD specifically that drove this finding.
In the current study depression and anxiety were controlled for as continuous variables. When these variables were fully controlled BPF were not found to predict problematic patterns of positive emotion regulation strategy use. However, when depression and anxiety were not controlled a problematic pattern of positive emotion regulation strategy use emerged. As a result it is suggested here that problematic positive emotion regulation associated with BPF is likely to result from high-levels of mood disturbance, which may be considered a part of BPF or a co-morbidity factor.
Exploratory analyses of individual strategies revealed that BPF was uniquely associated with increased inattention (the tendency to engage in events that are unrelated or harmful to current positive events/experiences) and fault finding (focusing attention on negative aspects of a positive situation) after controlling for age, gender, depression, anxiety, and other cluster B personality scores. The removal of depression, anxiety and cluster B personality scores as control variables led to BPF demonstrating a moderate significant positive relationship with all unhelpful strategies; inattention,
fault-finding, negative time travel, suppression, and a significant negative relationship
with two helpful strategies being present and behavioural display. Although preliminary, these findings are important as they provide a more detailed insight into how individuals with high levels of BPF attempt to regulate their emotions and the features that may be problematic. A common theme across three of the unhelpful strategies associated with BPF is the tendency for attention to be drawn away from the positive stimuli or experience and toward negative or irrelevant information. In line
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with this one of the helpful emotion regulation strategies used significantly less in this population, being present, requires one to maintain focus on current positive aspects of a situation.
The over-reporting of strategies to divert attention away from positive stimuli and under reporting of strategies that require attention maintenance on positive aspects of a situation may be an indication of the presence of a negative attention bias in individuals with high levels of BPF. This interpretation is consistent with the emotion cascade model (Selby & Joiner, 2009) and experimental research (Silbersweig et al., 2007) suggesting that individuals with high levels of BPF reported more problems disengaging from negative stimuli, which may result in rapid escalation of negative emotion intensity. This interpretation also extends past literature by suggesting that attentional bias not only affects negative emotion regulation processes but it may also be interfering with attempts to initiate or maintain positive emotions. This is consistent with research demonstrating that negative emotionality may reduce positive emotions in individuals with high levels of anxiety (Williams, Peeters, & Zautra, 2004). It is therefore proposed that the over-use of unhelpful strategies, such as rumination, for decreasing negative emotions results in higher levels of negative emotion, which in turn inhibits positive emotion regulation attempts and the subsequent development of positive emotions in this population.
Theoretically, the finding that individuals with high levels of BPF demonstrate problematic patterns of positive emotion strategy use is consistent with biosocial theory (Linehan, 1993), which states that although the problems in negative emotion regulation processes are more pronounced, individuals with high levels of BPF are also likely to experience difficulty in areas of positive emotion regulation. Further, findings from this study extend this theoretical viewpoint by identifying the use of unhelpful positive
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emotion regulation strategies, which appears to be driven by poor attentional control. Although, the empirical investigation of positive emotion regulation processes in relation to BPF is still in its infancy, the findings from this study highlight potentially problematic patterns of positive emotion regulation, which may help to explain the low levels of positive emotionality previously associated with high levels of BPF (Ebner- Priemer et al., 2007; Reed & Zanarini, 2011).