This video answers the question: What causes the anger component of borderline personality disorder? Borderline personality disorder has nine symptom criteria and that five criteria have to be met for a diagnosis of the disorder. Sometimes when we look at causation of disorders like borderline personality we're interested in what causes the disorder in general, but sometimes it's more helpful to look at a specific symptom of the disorder, even though that symptom isn't always present in every manifestation of the disorder. When we talk about anger and borderline personality disorder, we're talking about one specific symptom criterion. First, I'll go through all the symptom criteria and then into more detail about the anger. Again, there are nine symptom criteria with borderline personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, unstable and intense relationships, identity disturbance, impulsivity, suicidal behavior, affective instability, a chronic feeling of emptiness, inappropriate intense anger or difficulty controlling anger, and paranoid ideation. Specifically looking at the anger, it's important to understand that trait anger is different than state anger and both of those are different than what we see in borderline personality disorder. There's a lot of overlap particularly between trait anger and that symptom of borderline personality, but they're not the same thing. Trait anger can cause difficulty for individuals even when they don't meet the full criteria for borderline personality disorder and that symptom of borderline personality disorder. the inappropriate intense anger that can be present even if somebody doesn't have borderline personality disorder. There are a lot of different consequences to anger, which I'll talk about in a moment but first it is important to understand the difference between trait and state anger. State anger is episodic and fairly normal. Most everybody will have state anger from time to time in their lives. Trait anger is an aspect of personality and that's why we tend to think of trait anger as much more related to this anger symptom criterion in borderline personality disorder. This anger symptom criterion is actually the most prevalent symptom criterion with borderline personality. It's more prevalent than the other eight symptom criteria and it's the most prevalent in clinical and nonclinical samples. It's also the most prevalent and firstdegree relatives of individuals with borderline personality.
There's a general tendency for the symptoms of borderline personality to remit over time. They don't remit in every instance, but oftentimes they do to some degree and some remit faster than others. The anger criterion is the slowest to remit over time, so it's the most stubborn in essence. This anger criterion is also associated with a number of negative outcomes. With the anger criterion endorsed we see decreased functioning in work and social settings, increased incidents of comorbidity with substance use disorders, increased suicidal behavior, increased impulsivity, and increased paranoid ideation. We also see that anger is related to rejection sensitivity and increased conflict and with individuals.