Data for: Familiarity, empathy and comprehension of metaphors in patients with borderline personality disorder.
Description
Data used in for the manuscript "Familiarity, empathy and comprehension of metaphors in patients with borderline personality disorder." For each stimulus type, the dataset includes the absolute number of correct identified stimuli, the number of familiar stimuli and the proportion of familiar metaphors that had been answered correctly. Moreover, demographics and self-rating questionnaires are depicted for each participant. The supplementary material includes the applied German language metaphor comprehension test including English translations. The aim of the study was to address metaphor comprehension in borderline personality disorder (BPD) and its relationship to cognitive and affective empathy in 20 patients with BPD and 20 matched healthy controls who completed a metaphor task comprising conventional metaphors (CM), novel metaphors (NM), meaningless stimuli (MS), and a rating scale of familiarity, a factor known to influence performance. For cognitive and affective empathy, the interpersonal reactivity index was applied. Patients with BPD had significantly more problems in comprehending CM, but not NM or MS, and were less familiar with CM. When familiarity with the stimulus was controlled, this difference disappeared. Across all participants, fantasy correlated negatively with familiar CM. Results indicate a lack of knowledge rather than a pragmatic impairment in the comprehension of metaphors in patients with BPD.