No Laughing Matter: Borderline Personality Traits and Aberrant Sensitivity to Social Cues in Laughter
Faculty Mentor
Kevin Meehan
Major/Area of Research
Clinical Psychology
Description
INTRODUCTION: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by instability in emotion regulation, self-image, interpersonal relationships, and impulse control, and is associated with pronounced negativity biases in social information processing. These biases are linked to intense emotional reactions and maladaptive interpersonal behaviors. Relatively little research has examined interpretations of and responses to laughter—a ubiquitous and highly salient social signal that conveys differentiated communicative intent—in BPD.
METHOD: To address this gap, we employed a behavioral paradigm to examine how individuals higher in borderline personality (BP) traits interpret the communicative intent of laughter and their motivation to “join in” with different types of laughter. Participants (Sample 1, N = 369; Sample 2, N = 351) were drawn from urban universities in the Northeastern United States and recruited via CloudResearch’s Connect platform. Participants completed the behavioral task followed by questionnaires assessing borderline personality (BP) symptoms and related constructs. Analyses were conducted in R (R Core Team, 2025).
RESULTS: Higher BP traits were associated with greater accuracy in identifying dominant laughter as mocking and comparable accuracy in identifying affiliative laughter as friendly. However, BP traits were associated with reduced interest in joining affiliative laughter and comparable interest in joining dominant laughter. Individuals higher in BP traits also showed a tendency to categorize laughter with ambiguous communicative intent as mocking rather than friendly, although BP traits were unrelated to interest in joining ambiguous laughter.
DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest a dissociation between perceptual sensitivity and behavioral engagement, indicating that BP-related differences in social functioning may arise not from impaired recognition of communicative intent but from alterations in how perceived social meaning is translated into behavioral responses.
No Laughing Matter: Borderline Personality Traits and Aberrant Sensitivity to Social Cues in Laughter
INTRODUCTION: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by instability in emotion regulation, self-image, interpersonal relationships, and impulse control, and is associated with pronounced negativity biases in social information processing. These biases are linked to intense emotional reactions and maladaptive interpersonal behaviors. Relatively little research has examined interpretations of and responses to laughter—a ubiquitous and highly salient social signal that conveys differentiated communicative intent—in BPD.
METHOD: To address this gap, we employed a behavioral paradigm to examine how individuals higher in borderline personality (BP) traits interpret the communicative intent of laughter and their motivation to “join in” with different types of laughter. Participants (Sample 1, N = 369; Sample 2, N = 351) were drawn from urban universities in the Northeastern United States and recruited via CloudResearch’s Connect platform. Participants completed the behavioral task followed by questionnaires assessing borderline personality (BP) symptoms and related constructs. Analyses were conducted in R (R Core Team, 2025).
RESULTS: Higher BP traits were associated with greater accuracy in identifying dominant laughter as mocking and comparable accuracy in identifying affiliative laughter as friendly. However, BP traits were associated with reduced interest in joining affiliative laughter and comparable interest in joining dominant laughter. Individuals higher in BP traits also showed a tendency to categorize laughter with ambiguous communicative intent as mocking rather than friendly, although BP traits were unrelated to interest in joining ambiguous laughter.
DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest a dissociation between perceptual sensitivity and behavioral engagement, indicating that BP-related differences in social functioning may arise not from impaired recognition of communicative intent but from alterations in how perceived social meaning is translated into behavioral responses.