Isabel Dziobek | Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (original) (raw)

Papers by Isabel Dziobek

Background: While witnessing the suffering of other people results in personal distress, it is no... more Background: While witnessing the suffering of other people results in personal distress, it is not clear whether regulating others' emotions in such situations also comes at an emotional cost for the observer. Methods: This study included 62 subjects and used a newly developed functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) paradigm to investigate mechanisms of self and other emotion regulation via reappraisal while the subject and an interaction partner outside the scanner were facing the same distressing situation simultaneously. The relationship between distress levels and individual differences in emotional and cognitive empathy were also assessed. Results: We found that individuals exhibited especially high levels of personal distress when relating with a partner while both being exposed to aversive photographs and that especially highly empathetic individuals were prone to such personal distress. Moreover, when engaging in social emotion regulation, personal distress was reduced in the observer at a similar rate as in self emotion regulation. FMRI analyses revealed increased activation for other vs. self emotion regulation in the precuneus and the left temporo-parietal junction, which are commonly engaged in social cognition. Furthermore, this activation was associated with lower self-reported stress and decreased sympathetic autonomic activity. While regulating others, precuneus activation exhibited a distinctive functional connectivity profile with parietal emotion regulation regions. Conclusions: This study demonstrates benefits of actively regulating another person's emotions for reducing one's own distress and identifies the precuneus as an important node for social emotion regulation. Given the novelty of the study design, the results are of exploratory and preliminary nature.

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2021

The causes of aggressive behavior in children with autism are poorly understood, which limits tre... more The causes of aggressive behavior in children with autism are poorly understood, which limits treatment options. Therefore, this study used behavioral testing and parent reports of 60 children with autism to investigate the interplay of emotion misinterpretation and hostile attribution bias in the prediction of different aggressive behaviors. Further, the additional impact of dysfunctional emotion regulation was examined. Path analyses indicated that hostile attribution bias increased verbal and covert aggression but not physical aggression and bullying. Dysfunctional emotion regulation had an additional impact on bullying, verbal aggression, and covert aggression. Emotion recognition was positively associated with hostile attribution bias. These findings provide a first insight into a complex interplay of socio-emotional variables; longitudinal studies are needed to examine causal relationships.

npj Digital Medicine, 2022

Brain Sciences, 2021

Observing familiar (known, recognisable) and socially relevant (personally important) faces elici... more Observing familiar (known, recognisable) and socially relevant (personally important) faces elicits activation in the brain’s reward circuit. Although smiling faces are often used as social rewards in research, it is firstly unclear whether familiarity and social relevance modulate the processing of faces differently, and secondly whether this processing depends on the feedback context, i.e., if it is different when smiles are delivered depending on performance or in the absence of any action (passive viewing). In this preregistered study, we compared pupillary responses to smiling faces differing in subjective familiarity and social relevance. They were displayed in a passive viewing task and in an active task (a speeded visual short-term memory task). The pupils were affected only in the active task and only by subjective familiarity. Contrary to expectations, smaller dilations were observed in response to more familiar faces. Behavioural ratings supported the superior rewarding c...

Brain Sciences, 2021

When inferring the mental states of others, individuals’ judgments are influenced by their own st... more When inferring the mental states of others, individuals’ judgments are influenced by their own state of mind, an effect often referred to as egocentricity. Self–other differentiation is key for an accurate interpretation of other’s mental states, especially when these differ from one’s own states. It has been suggested that the right supramarginal gyrus (rSMG) is causally involved in overcoming egocentricity in the affective domain. In a double-blind randomized study, 47 healthy adults received anodal (1 mA, 20 min) or sham transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to the rSMG prior to performing a newly developed paradigm, the self–other facial emotion judgment (SOFE) task. In this task, participants made judgments of facial emotional expressions while having been previously confronted with congruent or incongruent emotion-inducing situations. To differentiate between emotional and cognitive egocentricity, participants additionally completed an established visual perspective-t...

Journal of Neural Transmission, 2021

The level of functioning of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) varies widely. To bet... more The level of functioning of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) varies widely. To better understand the neurobiological mechanism associated with high-functioning ASD, we studied the rare case of a female patient with an exceptional professional career in the highly competitive academic field of Mathematics. According to the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) approach, which proposes to describe the basic dimensions of functioning by integrating different levels of information, we conducted four fMRI experiments targeting the (1) social processes domain (Theory of mind (ToM) and face matching), (2) positive valence domain (reward processing), and (3) cognitive domain (N-back). Patient’s data were compared to data of 14 healthy controls (HC). Additionally, we assessed the subjective experience of our case during the experiments. The patient showed increased response times during face matching and achieved a higher total gain in the Reward task, whereas her performance in N-b...

Scientific Reports, 2020

Establishing direct gaze has been shown to enhance the tendency to automatically imitate the othe... more Establishing direct gaze has been shown to enhance the tendency to automatically imitate the other person’s actions, an effect that seems to be reduced in autism. Most previous studies, however, used experimental tasks that may have confounded the measurement of automatic imitation with spatial compatibility effects. This calls into question whether gaze cues regulate automatic imitation, or instead affect domain-general processes of response inhibition. Using a task that disentangled imitative from spatial compatibility effects, the current study re-examined the role of autistic traits on the modulation of automatic imitation by direct and averted gaze cues. While our results do not provide evidence for an overall significant influence of gaze on neither automatic imitation nor spatial compatibility, autistic traits were predictive of a reduced inhibition of imitative behaviour following averted gaze. Nonetheless, exploratory analyses suggested that the observed modulation by autis...

Psychological Research, 2020

Research in social cognition has shown that our own emotional experiences are an important source... more Research in social cognition has shown that our own emotional experiences are an important source of information to understand what other people are feeling. The current study investigated whether individuals project their own affective states when reading other’s emotional expressions. We used brief autobiographical recall and audiovisual stimuli to induce happy, neutral and sad transient states. After each emotion induction, participants made emotion judgments about ambiguous faces displaying a mixture of happiness and sadness. Using an adaptive psychophysics procedure, we estimated the tendency to perceive the faces as happy under each of the induced affective states. Results demonstrate the occurrence of egocentric projections, such that faces were more likely judged as happy when participants reported being happy as compared to when they were sad. Moreover, the degree of emotional egocentricity was associated with individual differences in perspective-taking, with smaller biase...

Understanding the association between autonomic nervous system [ANS] function and brain morpholog... more Understanding the association between autonomic nervous system [ANS] function and brain morphology across the lifespan provides important insights into neurovisceral mechanisms underlying health and disease. Resting state ANS activity, indexed by measures of heart rate [HR] and its variability [HRV] has been associated with brain morphology, particularly cortical thickness [CT]. While findings have been mixed regarding the anatomical distribution and direction of the associations, these inconsistencies may be due to sex and age differences in HR/HRV and CT. Previous studies have been limited by small sample sizes, which impede the assessment of sex differences and aging effects on the association between ANS function and CT. To overcome these limitations, 20 groups worldwide contributed data collected under similar protocols of CT assessment and HR/HRV recording to be pooled in a mega-analysis (N = 1,218 (50.5% female), mean age 36.7 years (range: 12-87)). Findings suggest that the ...

Cognition and Emotion, 2019

Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, Jan 15, 2018

Empathy is crucial for successful interpersonal interactions, and it is impaired in many psychiat... more Empathy is crucial for successful interpersonal interactions, and it is impaired in many psychiatric and neurological disorders. Action-perception matching, or action simulation mechanisms, have been suggested to facilitate empathy by supporting the simulation of perceived experience in others. However, this remains unclear, and the involvement of the action simulation circuit in cognitive empathy (the ability to adopt another's perspective) versus emotional empathy (the capacity to share and react affectively to another's emotional experience) has not been quantitatively compared. Presently, healthy adults completed a classic cognitive empathy task (false belief), an emotional empathy task, and an action simulation button-pressing task during fMRI. Conjunction analyses revealed common recruitment of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), thought to be critical for action-perception matching, during both action simulation and emotional, but not cognitive, empathy. Furthermore, ac...

The international journal of neuropsychopharmacology, 2018

The empathogen 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is the prototypical prosocial club drug i... more The empathogen 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is the prototypical prosocial club drug inducing emotional openness to others. It has recently been shown that acutely applied 3,4-MDMA in fact enhances emotional empathy and prosocial behavior, while it simultaneously decreases cognitive empathy. However, the long-term effects of 3,4-MDMA use on socio-cognitive functions and social interactions have not been investigated yet. Therefore, we examined emotional and cognitive empathy, social decision-making, and oxytocin plasma levels in chronic 3,4-MDMA users. We tested 38 regular but recently abstinent 3,4-MDMA users and 56 3,4-MDMA-naïve controls with the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition, the Multifaceted Empathy Test, and the Distribution Game and the Dictator Game. Drug use was objectively quantified by 6-month hair analyses. Furthermore, oxytocin plasma levels were determined in smaller subgroups (24 3,4-MDMA users, 9 controls). 3,4-MDMA users showed superior cog...

Frontiers in psychology, 2016

We present the ToMenovela, a stimulus set that has been developed to provide a set of normatively... more We present the ToMenovela, a stimulus set that has been developed to provide a set of normatively rated socio-emotional stimuli showing varying amount of characters in emotionally laden interactions for experimental investigations of (i) cognitive and (ii) affective Theory of Mind (ToM), (iii) emotional reactivity, and (iv) complex emotion judgment with respect to Ekman's basic emotions (happiness, anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, Ekman and Friesen, 1975). Stimuli were generated with focus on ecological validity and consist of 190 scenes depicting daily-life situations. Two or more of eight main characters with distinct biographies and personalities are depicted on each scene picture. To obtain an initial evaluation of the stimulus set and to pave the way for future studies in clinical populations, normative data on each stimulus of the set was obtained from a sample of 61 neurologically and psychiatrically healthy participants (31 female, 30 male; mean age 26.74 ± 5.84)...

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2016

Journal of autism and developmental disorders, Oct 25, 2016

In the current study, we assessed character strengths in individuals with autism spectrum disorde... more In the current study, we assessed character strengths in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD, n = 32) and neurotypical controls (n = 32) using the Values in Action Inventory (VIA-IS, Peterson and Seligman 2004) and explored associations with levels of satisfaction with life (SWL). The most frequently endorsed signature strengths (i.e., five top-ranked strengths within an individual's strength ranking) were emotional (humour, love) and interpersonal strengths (kindness, fairness) in the control group, the most frequently endorsed signature strengths in the ASD group were intellectual strengths (open-mindedness, creativity, love of learning). Interpersonal and emotional strengths had, however, the highest positive associations with SWL in the ASD group.

Journal of clinical psychology, Jan 16, 2016

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often experience difficulties in maintaining roma... more Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often experience difficulties in maintaining romantic relationships. In this study high-functioning adults with ASD were examined concerning their romantic relationship interest and experience. Participants, 31 recruited via an outpatient clinic and 198 via an online survey, were asked to answer a number of self-report questionnaires. The total sample comprised 229 high-functioning adults with ASD (40% males, average age: 35 years). Of the total sample, 73% indicated romantic relationship experience and only 7% had no desire to be in a romantic relationship. ASD individuals whose partner was also on the autism spectrum were significantly more satisfied with their relationship than those with neurotypical partners. Severity of autism, schizoid symptoms, empathy skills, and need for social support were not correlated with relationship status. Our findings indicate that the vast majority of high-functioning adults with ASD are interested ...

Psychiatry research, Jan 2, 2016

Diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder (BPD) include instability in identity and... more Diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder (BPD) include instability in identity and interpersonal relationships. Here, we probed whether instability is already present in BPD patients' thoughts about themselves and others. We tested BPD patients (N=27) and healthy controls (N=25) with a mind-wandering task that assesses content and variability of stimulus-independent self-generated thoughts. Multi-level modeling revealed that while BPD patients and healthy controls mind-wander to a similar extent, BPD patients' thoughts are colored predominantly negatively. Most importantly, although their thoughts concerned the self and others as much as in controls, they fluctuated more strongly in the degree to which their thoughts concerned themselves and others and also gave more extreme ratings. Self- and other related thoughts that were more extreme were also more negative in valence. The increased variability supports current conceptualizations of BPD and may account fo...

Background: While witnessing the suffering of other people results in personal distress, it is no... more Background: While witnessing the suffering of other people results in personal distress, it is not clear whether regulating others' emotions in such situations also comes at an emotional cost for the observer. Methods: This study included 62 subjects and used a newly developed functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) paradigm to investigate mechanisms of self and other emotion regulation via reappraisal while the subject and an interaction partner outside the scanner were facing the same distressing situation simultaneously. The relationship between distress levels and individual differences in emotional and cognitive empathy were also assessed. Results: We found that individuals exhibited especially high levels of personal distress when relating with a partner while both being exposed to aversive photographs and that especially highly empathetic individuals were prone to such personal distress. Moreover, when engaging in social emotion regulation, personal distress was reduced in the observer at a similar rate as in self emotion regulation. FMRI analyses revealed increased activation for other vs. self emotion regulation in the precuneus and the left temporo-parietal junction, which are commonly engaged in social cognition. Furthermore, this activation was associated with lower self-reported stress and decreased sympathetic autonomic activity. While regulating others, precuneus activation exhibited a distinctive functional connectivity profile with parietal emotion regulation regions. Conclusions: This study demonstrates benefits of actively regulating another person's emotions for reducing one's own distress and identifies the precuneus as an important node for social emotion regulation. Given the novelty of the study design, the results are of exploratory and preliminary nature.

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2021

The causes of aggressive behavior in children with autism are poorly understood, which limits tre... more The causes of aggressive behavior in children with autism are poorly understood, which limits treatment options. Therefore, this study used behavioral testing and parent reports of 60 children with autism to investigate the interplay of emotion misinterpretation and hostile attribution bias in the prediction of different aggressive behaviors. Further, the additional impact of dysfunctional emotion regulation was examined. Path analyses indicated that hostile attribution bias increased verbal and covert aggression but not physical aggression and bullying. Dysfunctional emotion regulation had an additional impact on bullying, verbal aggression, and covert aggression. Emotion recognition was positively associated with hostile attribution bias. These findings provide a first insight into a complex interplay of socio-emotional variables; longitudinal studies are needed to examine causal relationships.

npj Digital Medicine, 2022

Brain Sciences, 2021

Observing familiar (known, recognisable) and socially relevant (personally important) faces elici... more Observing familiar (known, recognisable) and socially relevant (personally important) faces elicits activation in the brain’s reward circuit. Although smiling faces are often used as social rewards in research, it is firstly unclear whether familiarity and social relevance modulate the processing of faces differently, and secondly whether this processing depends on the feedback context, i.e., if it is different when smiles are delivered depending on performance or in the absence of any action (passive viewing). In this preregistered study, we compared pupillary responses to smiling faces differing in subjective familiarity and social relevance. They were displayed in a passive viewing task and in an active task (a speeded visual short-term memory task). The pupils were affected only in the active task and only by subjective familiarity. Contrary to expectations, smaller dilations were observed in response to more familiar faces. Behavioural ratings supported the superior rewarding c...

Brain Sciences, 2021

When inferring the mental states of others, individuals’ judgments are influenced by their own st... more When inferring the mental states of others, individuals’ judgments are influenced by their own state of mind, an effect often referred to as egocentricity. Self–other differentiation is key for an accurate interpretation of other’s mental states, especially when these differ from one’s own states. It has been suggested that the right supramarginal gyrus (rSMG) is causally involved in overcoming egocentricity in the affective domain. In a double-blind randomized study, 47 healthy adults received anodal (1 mA, 20 min) or sham transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to the rSMG prior to performing a newly developed paradigm, the self–other facial emotion judgment (SOFE) task. In this task, participants made judgments of facial emotional expressions while having been previously confronted with congruent or incongruent emotion-inducing situations. To differentiate between emotional and cognitive egocentricity, participants additionally completed an established visual perspective-t...

Journal of Neural Transmission, 2021

The level of functioning of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) varies widely. To bet... more The level of functioning of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) varies widely. To better understand the neurobiological mechanism associated with high-functioning ASD, we studied the rare case of a female patient with an exceptional professional career in the highly competitive academic field of Mathematics. According to the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) approach, which proposes to describe the basic dimensions of functioning by integrating different levels of information, we conducted four fMRI experiments targeting the (1) social processes domain (Theory of mind (ToM) and face matching), (2) positive valence domain (reward processing), and (3) cognitive domain (N-back). Patient’s data were compared to data of 14 healthy controls (HC). Additionally, we assessed the subjective experience of our case during the experiments. The patient showed increased response times during face matching and achieved a higher total gain in the Reward task, whereas her performance in N-b...

Scientific Reports, 2020

Establishing direct gaze has been shown to enhance the tendency to automatically imitate the othe... more Establishing direct gaze has been shown to enhance the tendency to automatically imitate the other person’s actions, an effect that seems to be reduced in autism. Most previous studies, however, used experimental tasks that may have confounded the measurement of automatic imitation with spatial compatibility effects. This calls into question whether gaze cues regulate automatic imitation, or instead affect domain-general processes of response inhibition. Using a task that disentangled imitative from spatial compatibility effects, the current study re-examined the role of autistic traits on the modulation of automatic imitation by direct and averted gaze cues. While our results do not provide evidence for an overall significant influence of gaze on neither automatic imitation nor spatial compatibility, autistic traits were predictive of a reduced inhibition of imitative behaviour following averted gaze. Nonetheless, exploratory analyses suggested that the observed modulation by autis...

Psychological Research, 2020

Research in social cognition has shown that our own emotional experiences are an important source... more Research in social cognition has shown that our own emotional experiences are an important source of information to understand what other people are feeling. The current study investigated whether individuals project their own affective states when reading other’s emotional expressions. We used brief autobiographical recall and audiovisual stimuli to induce happy, neutral and sad transient states. After each emotion induction, participants made emotion judgments about ambiguous faces displaying a mixture of happiness and sadness. Using an adaptive psychophysics procedure, we estimated the tendency to perceive the faces as happy under each of the induced affective states. Results demonstrate the occurrence of egocentric projections, such that faces were more likely judged as happy when participants reported being happy as compared to when they were sad. Moreover, the degree of emotional egocentricity was associated with individual differences in perspective-taking, with smaller biase...

Understanding the association between autonomic nervous system [ANS] function and brain morpholog... more Understanding the association between autonomic nervous system [ANS] function and brain morphology across the lifespan provides important insights into neurovisceral mechanisms underlying health and disease. Resting state ANS activity, indexed by measures of heart rate [HR] and its variability [HRV] has been associated with brain morphology, particularly cortical thickness [CT]. While findings have been mixed regarding the anatomical distribution and direction of the associations, these inconsistencies may be due to sex and age differences in HR/HRV and CT. Previous studies have been limited by small sample sizes, which impede the assessment of sex differences and aging effects on the association between ANS function and CT. To overcome these limitations, 20 groups worldwide contributed data collected under similar protocols of CT assessment and HR/HRV recording to be pooled in a mega-analysis (N = 1,218 (50.5% female), mean age 36.7 years (range: 12-87)). Findings suggest that the ...

Cognition and Emotion, 2019

Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, Jan 15, 2018

Empathy is crucial for successful interpersonal interactions, and it is impaired in many psychiat... more Empathy is crucial for successful interpersonal interactions, and it is impaired in many psychiatric and neurological disorders. Action-perception matching, or action simulation mechanisms, have been suggested to facilitate empathy by supporting the simulation of perceived experience in others. However, this remains unclear, and the involvement of the action simulation circuit in cognitive empathy (the ability to adopt another's perspective) versus emotional empathy (the capacity to share and react affectively to another's emotional experience) has not been quantitatively compared. Presently, healthy adults completed a classic cognitive empathy task (false belief), an emotional empathy task, and an action simulation button-pressing task during fMRI. Conjunction analyses revealed common recruitment of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), thought to be critical for action-perception matching, during both action simulation and emotional, but not cognitive, empathy. Furthermore, ac...

The international journal of neuropsychopharmacology, 2018

The empathogen 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is the prototypical prosocial club drug i... more The empathogen 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is the prototypical prosocial club drug inducing emotional openness to others. It has recently been shown that acutely applied 3,4-MDMA in fact enhances emotional empathy and prosocial behavior, while it simultaneously decreases cognitive empathy. However, the long-term effects of 3,4-MDMA use on socio-cognitive functions and social interactions have not been investigated yet. Therefore, we examined emotional and cognitive empathy, social decision-making, and oxytocin plasma levels in chronic 3,4-MDMA users. We tested 38 regular but recently abstinent 3,4-MDMA users and 56 3,4-MDMA-naïve controls with the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition, the Multifaceted Empathy Test, and the Distribution Game and the Dictator Game. Drug use was objectively quantified by 6-month hair analyses. Furthermore, oxytocin plasma levels were determined in smaller subgroups (24 3,4-MDMA users, 9 controls). 3,4-MDMA users showed superior cog...

Frontiers in psychology, 2016

We present the ToMenovela, a stimulus set that has been developed to provide a set of normatively... more We present the ToMenovela, a stimulus set that has been developed to provide a set of normatively rated socio-emotional stimuli showing varying amount of characters in emotionally laden interactions for experimental investigations of (i) cognitive and (ii) affective Theory of Mind (ToM), (iii) emotional reactivity, and (iv) complex emotion judgment with respect to Ekman's basic emotions (happiness, anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, Ekman and Friesen, 1975). Stimuli were generated with focus on ecological validity and consist of 190 scenes depicting daily-life situations. Two or more of eight main characters with distinct biographies and personalities are depicted on each scene picture. To obtain an initial evaluation of the stimulus set and to pave the way for future studies in clinical populations, normative data on each stimulus of the set was obtained from a sample of 61 neurologically and psychiatrically healthy participants (31 female, 30 male; mean age 26.74 ± 5.84)...

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2016

Journal of autism and developmental disorders, Oct 25, 2016

In the current study, we assessed character strengths in individuals with autism spectrum disorde... more In the current study, we assessed character strengths in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD, n = 32) and neurotypical controls (n = 32) using the Values in Action Inventory (VIA-IS, Peterson and Seligman 2004) and explored associations with levels of satisfaction with life (SWL). The most frequently endorsed signature strengths (i.e., five top-ranked strengths within an individual's strength ranking) were emotional (humour, love) and interpersonal strengths (kindness, fairness) in the control group, the most frequently endorsed signature strengths in the ASD group were intellectual strengths (open-mindedness, creativity, love of learning). Interpersonal and emotional strengths had, however, the highest positive associations with SWL in the ASD group.

Journal of clinical psychology, Jan 16, 2016

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often experience difficulties in maintaining roma... more Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often experience difficulties in maintaining romantic relationships. In this study high-functioning adults with ASD were examined concerning their romantic relationship interest and experience. Participants, 31 recruited via an outpatient clinic and 198 via an online survey, were asked to answer a number of self-report questionnaires. The total sample comprised 229 high-functioning adults with ASD (40% males, average age: 35 years). Of the total sample, 73% indicated romantic relationship experience and only 7% had no desire to be in a romantic relationship. ASD individuals whose partner was also on the autism spectrum were significantly more satisfied with their relationship than those with neurotypical partners. Severity of autism, schizoid symptoms, empathy skills, and need for social support were not correlated with relationship status. Our findings indicate that the vast majority of high-functioning adults with ASD are interested ...

Psychiatry research, Jan 2, 2016

Diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder (BPD) include instability in identity and... more Diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder (BPD) include instability in identity and interpersonal relationships. Here, we probed whether instability is already present in BPD patients' thoughts about themselves and others. We tested BPD patients (N=27) and healthy controls (N=25) with a mind-wandering task that assesses content and variability of stimulus-independent self-generated thoughts. Multi-level modeling revealed that while BPD patients and healthy controls mind-wander to a similar extent, BPD patients' thoughts are colored predominantly negatively. Most importantly, although their thoughts concerned the self and others as much as in controls, they fluctuated more strongly in the degree to which their thoughts concerned themselves and others and also gave more extreme ratings. Self- and other related thoughts that were more extreme were also more negative in valence. The increased variability supports current conceptualizations of BPD and may account fo...