Precision Psychiatry Wiki

Borderline personality disorder

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Borderline personality disorder (BPD)

The clinical condition anchoring the near-term collaboration. It is the population in the funded VSMT avatar-therapy trial and the setting in which Speech Gap would be tested longitudinally.

Why BPD specifically

Three reasons converge:

  1. A funded clinical trial already exists. The NKFIH ADVANCED_25 grant (entry 153443, PI Zsolt Unoka) supports Adaptation of Avatar Therapy to Borderline Personality Disorder: Virtual Schema Mode Therapy. A longitudinal speech sub-study can nest inside it without recruiting a separate cohort.
  2. There is direct BPD speech evidence. Not a general assumption that speech reflects mental state, but a specific published finding in this population.
  3. Therapy produces change over weeks. A 12-week course gives a real trajectory to measure, which is what the within-person design needs.

The narrative-speech evidence

Felletár et al., Increased self-focus and diminished informativity: referential and structural properties of narrative speech production in borderline personality disorder (DOI).

  • Sample. 33 participants with BPD, 31 healthy controls.
  • Tasks. Previous-day recall, story retelling, picture-sequence description.
  • Hypothesis-driven findings. Fewer content words, more first-person singular verbs, lower syntactic complexity in BPD.
  • Exploratory findings. Greater pronoun use; task-dependent effects.
  • The bridging finding. Linguistic formulation was linked to silent and filled pauses within the BPD group — connecting linguistic structure to the exact temporal events Speech Gap measures.

Stated limitations, which should shape both the protocol and how exploratory results are read: relatively small Hungarian-language sample, gender imbalance, lack of neuropsychological testing, clinical-documentation-based BPD diagnosis, comorbidity, incomplete pharmacotherapy information, and the need for replication across languages.

Safeguard. This study supplies a rationale for combining temporal and linguistic features. It does not validate a treatment-response predictor.

The respiratory angle

BPD is also the reason the respiratory signal extension matters. Breathing changes, including possible heavy or rapid breathing, may carry clinically relevant information in this population — information the current software discards by treating respiratory pauses as silence.

Semmelweis / VIKOTE · Zsolt Unoka · Speech Gap · Avatar therapy · Temporal speech parameters · Respiratory signal extension

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