Effectiveness of an Emotional Working Memory Training in Borderline Personality Disorder: A Proof-of-Principle Study
Abstract
pared to a placebo training [8]. We hypothesized that improvements in ER were predicted by improvements in eWM (performance on an adapted Sternberg task). For this randomized controlled trial, 68 participants were recruited at the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, Central Institute of Mental Health (CIMH), Mannheim, Germany, through the outpatient treatment unit and existing databases [2]. Interested participants were invited for extensive screening by trained clinical psychologists. Inclusion criteria were female gender, age between 18 and 55 years, and a DSMIV-TR diagnosis of BPD. We excluded patients with current hospitalization, acute suicidal crisis, lifetime diagnosis of schizophrenia, bipolar I disorder, organic brain diseases, severe neurological diseases, change of psychotropic medication during training, and those living ≥150 km outside of Mannheim. From those, who had been randomly allocated to the two training conditions, 18 participants (eWM: n = 12, 32%; cognitive feature match [CFM]: n = 6, 19%) did not start or dropped out of the training and 5 participants were excluded due to changes in medication (complete participant flow: online suppl. Fig. 1; for all online suppl. material, see www.karger.com/doi/10.1159/000504454). The final two groups (eWM: n = 22; CFM: n = 23) did not differ significantly in age, intelligence, education, comorbidities, and medication status (online suppl. Table 1). In the adapted eWMt, participants first…
How strong is the evidence?
Evidence Hub reads this as a randomized trial, done in people. Its evidence level is 2 of 5 (High · randomized trial). Randomized trials of a reasonable size are the strongest single-study design. Reported size: 68 participants or records.
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