Meta-Analytic Evidence for Acute Pain Hyposensitivity in Borderline Personality Disorder: Where Do We Go From Here? COMMENT

Pain is a fundamental quality of human sensation. The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) defines pain as “anunpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, orresembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage”(Raja et al., 2020, p. 1977). In their accompanying notes, the IASPemphasizes that the experience of pain should not be equated withnociception, that is, the sensory nervous system's encoding of noxiousstimuli. Acute pain, as it is associated with actual or imminentbodily harm, has the important biological function to make an organismaware of potential threats. Accordingly, and in addition toa sensory-discriminative and a cognitive-evaluative dimension,there is an affective-motivational component of pain, which usuallygives painful experiences a negative subjective connotationthat in turn triggers behavioral adaptations to avoid the bodilyharm. However, this general rule is not without exception.Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe mental disorderthat is characterized by impaired emotion regulation capabilities,disturbances in interpersonal behavior, and an unstable senseof self. Previous experimental evidence suggests that one particularattribute of BPD is acute pain hyposensitivity, that is, participantswith BPD diagnosis perceive noxious stimuli as less painfulcompared to non-clinical control participants. This reduced sensitivityto pain appears to be independent of stimulus modality interms of thermal, mechanical, chemical, or electrical stimulation(Schmahl & Baumgärtner, 2015) © 2021. American Psychological Association