This video answers question: What is emotional switching with borderline personality disorder? When we talk about the term emotional switching with borderline personality disorder we're talking about changing emotional states from positive to negative or from negative to positive. We would refer to changing within a type of emotional state (like negative to negative or positive positive) as simply emotional changing. Borderline personality disorder is a Cluster B personality disorder (dramatic, emotional, and erratic cluster). It's in the same cluster as antisocial, narcissistic, and histrionic personality disorders. There are nine symptom criteria for borderline personality (only five have to be met for diagnosis) including frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, unstable and intense relationships, identity disturbance, impulsivity, suicidal behavior, affective instability, chronic feelings of emptiness, inappropriate intense anger or a difficulty controlling anger, and paranoid ideation. We can see how a number of these symptom criteria could be connected to this concept of emotional switching. Again, changing emotions within the same polarity is not emotional switching. I'll just refer to this as emotional changing and the most common emotional changes that have been observed in the research are anxiety sadness sadness anxiety and anxiety – anger. All of these changes are within the negative polarity, so they're all moving from one negative emotional state to another negative emotional state. The probability that somebody would go from negative to positive or positive and negative in terms of emotional state is referred to as switching propensity. The size of the change is referred to as switching distance. Research has shown that emotional propensity is the same for those with BPD and those without it, but emotional distance is greater for those with BPD.