科研之友
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摘要
Affective instability is an essential criterion for borderline personality disorder (BPD) but studies using diaries have rendered conflicting results. Discrepant findings may be caused by differences in the time-based design, especially in the diverse length of the time intervals between self-reports. Even though there is consensus that the time-based design should fit the temporal dynamics of the processes of interest, no general conventions exist. We used 24 h ambulatory monitoring to repeatedly assess subjective ratings of distress in 50 BPD-patients and in 50 healthy controls. We investigated if the chosen time-based design with a time interval of 15 min between self-reports (1) reveals within subject variability in BPD-patients and (2) taps the process of interest. Using graphical and statistical evaluation, we demonstrate that the time-based design (15 min/24 h) does catch within-person variability in the BPD-patients. Comparison of the original data with randomly distributed data (simulation) and autocorrelation analyses prove that we tapped a specific process and did not randomly pick states of distress. Using increasing lags between self-reports reveals that short intervals, especially, (15 min, 30 min) tap a specific process. We recommend using short time intervals to study temporal dynamics of affective instability.
- 出版日期2007
- 单位上海市精神卫生中心
