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Urges for nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) are important precursors to NSSI acts and may serve as a point of intervention. A close understanding of the phenomenology of NSSI urges and the contexts in which they occur is therefore warranted. We used ambulatory assessment to examine the environmental, interpersonal, and affective contexts of NSSI urges. We recruited 56 participants with borderline personality disorder who reported on urges and contexts for 21 days with six random daily prompts, resulting in 5,750 completed assessments. Twenty-two participants reported 160 NSSI urges. We provide extensive descriptive results characterizing the interaction partners, activities, and events participants reported in association with NSSI urges. Results from a logistic multilevel model using the full sample (testing associations between all contexts and urges simultaneously) revealed that urges were more likely to occur at higher levels of negative affect, when rejection was experienced, and later in the day. Urges were not associated with disagreements or feeling let down, being at home versus away, being alone versus in company, socializing versus doing another activity, and it being a weekday versus weekend. Additional growth curve analysis for negative affect using the subsample of 22 participants who reported urges showed that, over the course of urge days compared with nonurge days, negative affect increased before urges, peaked during the urge, and then decreased, approximating a quadratic curve. We conclude that urges occurred primarily in the context of negative affect and rejection, which is consistent with theories on intra- and interpersonal functions of NSSI. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe psychiatric disorder associated with dysregulation in multiple domains of functioning. Physical health, and specifically pain, is one such domain that has gone understudied. Although evidence suggests that BPD is associated with chronic pain, few studies have examined nonchronic pain in the disorder. The current study used ambulatory assessment to examine momentary physical pain in everyday life in BPD outpatients ( N = 26) and community comparisons (COM; N = 26) not in treatment for chronic pain ( N observations = 5,458). We predicted and observed that BPD outpatients would report greater pain intensity and greater pain variability than COM comparisons. We also examined the relationship of pain and emotion dysregulation, a core feature of BPD, by testing the association between pain and negative affect concurrently and lagged over time. We predicted that momentary pain and negative affect would be associated in both groups, but that pain would predict negative affect more strongly in the BPD group. As predicted, concurrent pain and negative affect were associated in both groups, and groups differed significantly in terms of the association of lagged pain and next-assessment negative affect, with a negative association in the COM group. The current study represents a preliminary first step, finding that pain is relevant to the everyday experience of BPD individuals. This pain propensity may contribute to the elevated prevalence of BPD in chronic pain samples. Further, BPD individuals demonstrated emotional reactivity to pain, suggesting that pain may be a contributor to emotion dysregulation in this disorder. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Although borderline personality disorder (BPD) features consistently show strong relations with chronic pain, the mechanisms underlying this association remain unclear. BPD is characterized by dysregulated emotion. Given previously observed relationships between emotion dysregulation and pain, we hypothesized that components of this dysregulation-elevated and labile negative affect and emotion sensitivity-would account for the relationship between BPD features and various pain complaints in a chronic pain patient sample. Specifically, we hypothesized that negative affect would indirectly predict pain through higher emotion sensitivity to pain, operationalized as pain anxiety sensitivity. To test these hypotheses, we administered a series of self-report measures to 147 patients at a chronic pain treatment facility. As expected, BPD features predicted pain severity (β = .19, p = .029), activity interference from pain (β = .22, p = .015), and affective interference from pain (β = .41, p < .001). Using path analyses, we found that the associations between BPD features and pain severity and interference were accounted for by serial indirect pathways through affective lability then pain anxiety and, to a lesser extent, through trait anxiety then pain anxiety. This is the first study to demonstrate roles for affective lability and pain anxiety sensitivity in the association between BPD features and chronic pain complaints in a chronic pain sample. We discuss implications for the relationship between dysregulated emotion and pain as well as for psychologically-focused treatment interventions for pain. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).)

Past studies identify Five Factor Model (FFM) domains that are characteristic of borderline personality disorder (BPD), including those associated with specific BPD symptoms, at a between-person level. The present study replicated these between-person associations and extended past research by assessing whether the FFM explains within-person variance in the manifestation of momentary BPD symptoms in the presence or absence of close social contact (CSC). We measured CSC and the BPD core symptoms negative affectivity, impulsivity, and interpersonal problems in 74 BPD patients and in a clinical control group of 40 depressed patients over the course of 28 days, 6 times a day. The FFM domains showed specificity in predicting momentary BPD symptoms and interacted with CSC in doing so. In particular, for BPD individuals only, momentary impulsivity and interpersonal problems were associated with higher neuroticism and extraversion and lower agreeableness, and these associations were especially strong in situations involving CSC. Negative affectivity was predicted by neuroticism for both groups of individuals, and this association was generally unaffected by CSC. Overall, experiencing CSC was positively associated with momentary BPD symptoms. Thus, both the FFM and CSC were associated with BPD patients' experience of symptoms in everyday life. Furthermore, specific FFM trait domains were particularly impactful in contexts where BPD symptoms are more likely to be manifested, providing further evidence that person-by-situation interactions are important for understanding BPD symptoms in the moment. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).)

Individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD), compared to controls, report a relative absence of acute pain. In contrast, BPD is overrepresented among chronic pain patients, suggesting they experience a relative excess of chronic pain. To date, this "pain paradox" has been only partially explored; no study has examined both acute and chronic pain in the same sample. In addition, previous research has not fully examined the effect of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) on either acute or chronic pain experience in BPD. Undergraduates (N = 206), oversampled for those high in BPD features, completed a Cold Pressor Task (CPT), rating their pain every 15 s over a maximum of 4 min. Following the CPT, participants completed measures of BPD features, NSSI history, past-year pain, and perceived pain tolerance. Results did not support the expected negative association between BPD features and acute pain. Multilevel modeling revealed an interaction of BPD features and NSSI history on CPT pain ratings: Among individuals in the no-NSSI group, BPD features were associated with greater acute pain. Among individuals in the NSSI group, BPD features were not significantly associated with acute pain. Results for past-year pain indicated that BPD features were associated with greater past-year pain regardless of NSSI history. This finding, coupled with the difference in the association of BPD features and acute pain between the NSSI and no-NSSI groups provides tentative evidence that the combination of BPD features and NSSI history, among nonclinical samples, is linked to a pain paradox., ((c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).)