Resumen de Differentiating borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder through emotional dependency, emotional instability, impulsiveness and aggressiveness traits

L.F. Carvalho, Giselle Pianowski

• Aiming to contribute on the investigation of discriminative features of the borderline personality disorder (BPD) and bipolar disorder (BD), we investigated the capacity of specifics pathological traits in discriminating BPD from BD patients. Participants were 258 adults: 30 BPD outpatients, 28 BD outpatients, and 200 non-patients. Through repeated measures ANOVA (with post hoc), contrast ANOVA and regression analyzes, we verified the discriminatory capacity of emotional dependency, emotional instability, impulsiveness and aggressivity traits. As expected, the BPD patients showed higher severity in all traits, but impulsiveness. The most discriminative traits were from emotional instability, specifically Anxious worry and Hopelessness traits.