Feeling hollow: examining the presence and emotional correlates of emptiness in borderline personality disorder
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Feelings of emptiness represent a common experience among individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) that are not well understood. Theoretical literature suggests that emptiness functions to downregulate intense emotional experiences in BPD, but this has not been tested. This study examines whether (1) emptiness at baseline and emptiness in response to stressors (i.e. emptiness reactivity) is elevated in BPD relative to clinical and healthy controls (HCs), and whether (2) emptiness reactivity predicts emotion reactivity across self-report, skin conductance response (SCR), and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) indices of emotion. Participants (N = 120) with BPD, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), or HCs provided measurements of emptiness, self-reported emotion, SCR, and RSA at baseline and following a rejection-themed stressor. Results revealed that baseline emptiness was highest in the BPD group compared to the HC group and the GAD group. There were no significant group differences for emptiness reactivity. Overall, increases in emptiness predicted increases and decreases in emotional reactivity via self-report and RSA, respectively. These results suggest that higher baseline emptiness rather than emptiness reactivity is characteristic of BPD. Future research using longitudinal and ecological momentary assessment designs is needed to examine the causes of emptiness and how it can be effectively reduced.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".