Training emotional intelligence improves both emotional intelligence and depressive symptoms in inpatients with borderline personality disorder and depression

Abstract

Objective. Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is defined as a pervasive pattern of instability in emotion, mood and interpersonal relationships, with a comorbidity between PBD and depressive disorders (DD). A key competence for successful management of interpersonal relationships is emotional intelligence (EI). Given the low EI of patients suffering from BPD, the present study aimed at investigating the effect on both emotional intelligence and depression of training emotional intelligence in patients with BPD and DD. Methods. A total of 30 inpatients with BPD and DD (53% females; mean age 24.20 years) took part in the study. Patients were randomly assigned either to the treatment or to the control group. Pre- and post-testing 4 weeks later involved experts’ rating of depressive disorder and self-reported EI. The treatment group received 12 sessions of training in components of emotional intelligence. Results. Relative to the control group, EI increased significantly in the treatment group over time. Depressive symptoms decreased significantly over time in both groups, though improvement was greater in the treatment than the control group. Conclusion. For inpatients suffering from BPD and DD, regular skill training in EI can be successfully implemented and leads to improvements both in EI and depression. Results suggest an additive effect of EI training on both EI and depressive symptoms.

Key Words::

• Emotional intelligence
• borderline personality disorder
• depression

Acknowledgement

We thank Nick Emler (Surrey, UK) for proofreading the manuscript.

Statement of interest

The study has been conducted without external funding, and all authors declare no conflicts of interests.

Notes

¹Note that the completion rate of 81.1% exceeds the average completion rate of 75% for psychotherapeutic treatments of patients with BPD [34].

²Topics for the 12 sessions were as follows: (1) emotion regulation is a learnable task; you can learn how to control your emotions; (2) how to recognize your emotions; (3) how to recognize other people's emotions; (4) how to supervise and regulate your emotions; (5) how to evaluate the emotion of other people; (6) how the see your emotions from others’ point of view; (7) how to derive information from your emotions; (8) how to regulate emotions by regulating the emotional response; cognitive re-evaluation; change the focus of attention, and more appropriate forms of anger expression; (9) how to regulate the emotion of others by active listening, empathy, and humour; (10) education of interpersonal skills and assertiveness; (11) education of problem solving techniques; (12) education of stress-reducing strategies (cf. [36–39]).

³Preliminary calculations revealed that age, years of education and marital status were unrelated to EI, DD or gender (r values < 0.12, P > 0.30).