Time Perspective and the Subjective Passage of Time in Patients with Borderline Personality Disorders

Patients with borderline personality disorders (BPD) show heightened negative affect and maladaptive emotion-regulation strategies. An individual's time perspective towards the past, present, and future as well as the feeling of time passage are strongly related to affect and emotion regulation. We therefore assessed the time perspective (Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, ZTPI) and the subjective passage of time for present and past time intervals (Subjective Time Questionnaire, STQ) in 17 patients with BPD between the ages of 18 and 52 and 17 control subjects matched for gender, age and education. Patients with BPD show deviations in nearly all time orientations in the ZTPI: lower scores in the future and the past-positive dimension and higher scores in the present-fatalistic and past-negative dimensions. Patients deviate significantly more than controls from a balanced time perspective (BTP). Regarding the STQ, patients with BPD feel a general expansion of time at present but not for past intervals. Taken together, we show how BPD can be understood as a strong imbalance in individual time orientations and a most likely negatively felt expansion of subjective time in daily life.