Our paper on the effect of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) on the psychophysiological relaxation response was published in Comprehensive Psychiatry!
In this within-subject experiment, patients with BPD and healthy controls completed two relaxation exercises: a nature exposure in virtual reality and paced breathing, while we obtained heart activity using a Polar sensor on a chest belt to later compute heart rate variability (indexing parasympathetic cardiac activity). We found that both interventions increased psychological relaxation in patients with BPD as well as control individuals, but scores were generally higher in controls. Similarly, HRV was generally higher in controls as compared with patients with BPD, but the response to the interventions did not differ between the groups. This implies that – albeit patients with BPD display lower parasympathetic activity and higher psychological tension at baseline – their psychophysiological relaxation response does not seem to be impaired.
Congratulations to Dr. Raphaela Gärtner, who took the lead on this study as part of her PhD thesis!