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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Personality Disorders
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1354762

Automatic detection of facial expressions during the Cyberball paradigm in Borderline Personality Disorder: A Pilot study

Provisionally accepted
IVAN ARANGO IVAN ARANGO 1Adriana Reyes-Soto Adriana Reyes-Soto 1Alejandra Rosales-Lagarde Alejandra Rosales-Lagarde 1,2*Marta L. Eraña-Díaz Marta L. Eraña-Díaz 3Enrique Vázquez-Mendoza Enrique Vázquez-Mendoza 4Andrés Rodríguez-Delgado Andrés Rodríguez-Delgado 1Jairo Muñoz-Delgado Jairo Muñoz-Delgado 1
  • 1 National Institute of Psychiatry Ramon de la Fuente Muñiz (INPRFM), Mexico City, México, Mexico
  • 2 National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT), Benito Juárez, Mexico
  • 3 Autonomous University of the State of Morelos, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico
  • 4 Autonomous University of the State of Hidalgo, Pachuca, Hidalgo, Mexico

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) symptoms include inappropriate control of anger and severe emotional dysregulation after rejection in daily life. Nevertheless, when using the Cyberball paradigm, a tossing game to simulate social exclusion, the seven basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust, and contempt) have not been exhaustively tracked out. \textcolor{red}{It was hypothesized that} these patients would show anger, contempt, and disgust during the condition of exclusion versus the condition of inclusion. When facial emotions are automatically detected by Artificial Intelligence, ``blending'', -or a mixture of at least two emotions- and ``masking'', -or showing happiness while expressing negative emotions- may be most easily traced \textcolor{red}{expecting higher percentages during exclusion rather than inclusion.} \textcolor{red}{Therefore}, face videos of fourteen patients diagnosed with BPD (26$\pm$6 years old), recorded while playing the tossing game, were analyzed by the FaceReader software. The comparison of conditions highlighted an interaction for anger: it increased during inclusion and decreased during exclusion. During exclusion, the masking of surprise; i.e., displaying happiness while feeling surprised, was significantly more expressed. Furthermore, disgust and contempt were inversely correlated with greater difficulties in emotion regulation and symptomatology, respectively. Therefore, the automatic detection of emotional expressions during both conditions could be useful in rendering diagnostic guidelines in clinical scenarios.

    Keywords: Borderline Personality Disorder, Cyberball paradigm, social exclusion, Face, Emotions, non-verbal expression, pattern analysis, analysis under the curve

    Received: 15 Dec 2023; Accepted: 04 Apr 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 ARANGO, Reyes-Soto, Rosales-Lagarde, Eraña-Díaz, Vázquez-Mendoza, Rodríguez-Delgado and Muñoz-Delgado. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Alejandra Rosales-Lagarde, National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT), Benito Juárez, Mexico

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