People who remember their childhoods as unstable and unpredictable report more emotional, interpersonal, impulsive, and borderline dissociative traits as adults, according to a study published in . evolutionary psychology.
Borderline personality pathology is associated with a variety of challenges, including emotional instability, impulsivity, interpersonal conflict, and disruption of identity and self-regulation. Rather than treating borderline personality disorder as a hit-or-miss diagnosis, researchers are increasingly examining these traits as traits that continually change across populations.
Although childhood abuse, neglect, invalidation, and other adverse experiences have always been associated with borderline pathology, previous research has primarily focused on specific events and cumulative adversity rather than the broader structure of a person’s childhood environment.
Virgil Zeigler-Hill and colleagues investigated whether borderline characteristics were related not only to the severity of childhood adversity but also to the stability of the broader childhood environment. Based on life history theory, they distinguished between “harshness,” which refers to chronic hardship such as resource scarcity or persistent threats, and “unpredictability,” which refers to the instability of caregiving, daily life, and family situations.
Researchers investigated how these symptoms relate to the four components of borderline personality. Neurotic traits include negative affect and emotional instability; Hostile traits include hostility and interpersonal conflict; Disinhibited traits include impulsivity and poor behavioral control; and Dissociative traits include identity confusion and a sense of unreality.
Zeigler-Hill and colleagues conducted three studies with a total of 4,993 participants. Study 1 included a final sample of 529 U.S. adults recruited through Prolific, Study 2 included 2,478 undergraduates from a large Midwestern university, and Study 3 included 1,986 Israeli adults recruited through public service announcements and social media. The Israeli research materials were translated into Hebrew and independently translated into English to ensure accuracy.
Participants completed the Childhood Harshness and Unpredictability Rating Scale. The 11-item Harshness subscale assesses chronic material and environmental hardships, such as financial strain, whereas the 15-item Unpredictability subscale assesses the instability of home life and daily routines. They also completed measures of neurotic, antagonistic, disinhibitory, and borderline dissociative traits. Studies 1 and 3 used the Five-Element Borderline Inventory-Super-Abbreviated Form, whereas Study 2 used the longer Five-Element Borderline Inventory-Abbreviated Form. The researchers then examined how each childhood condition was associated with four borderline traits, whether harshness altered the association of unpredictability with those traits, and whether these patterns differed for men and women.
Across all three samples, perceptions of unpredictability in childhood were consistently associated with higher levels of all borderline traits examined. Those who remembered their childhood environments as more volatile and inconsistent tended to report more emotional instability and distress, more hostility and interpersonal conflict, more impulsive behavior, and more dissociative experiences. These relationships were evident in a U.S. community sample, a U.S. student sample, and an Israeli community sample, suggesting that this pattern is not limited to one age group, recruitment method, or national context.
The researchers predicted that childhood unpredictability would be associated with borderline neurotic, antagonistic, and disinhibited traits. Although the relationship with dissociative traits was examined without specific predictions, unpredictability was also consistently associated with higher dissociative traits across the three studies.
The rigors of childhood produced a much less simple pattern. When considered on their own, the associations with borderline traits were not very strong, but when unpredictability was considered simultaneously, these relationships often became insignificant or slightly negative. Harshness also altered the relationships between unpredictability and all four borderline traits.
In two U.S. samples, unpredictability showed the strongest association with borderline traits among those who generally reported relatively low childhood harshness. The difference was smaller in the Israeli sample. The authors suggest that consistently harsh environments may contain more stable and understandable contingencies than environments that change unexpectedly, but stress that this does not make harsh environments beneficial.
Gender differences were inconsistent, with the association between unpredictability and hostile traits being stronger among men in the two American studies but not in Israel, while the association with disinhibiting traits was stronger among men only in the student sample.
Of note, these studies are correlational and ask adults to recall their childhood environment, so they cannot prove that childhood unpredictability caused later borderline traits. Your current personality and mood can also influence your childhood memories. Similarly, exclusive reliance on self-report measures, use of a nonclinical sample, and recruitment from only the United States and Israel limit the extent to which the findings can be generalized to people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and other cultural settings.
Overall, these findings suggest that environmental instability and inconsistency during early childhood may be more closely related to a variety of borderline personality traits than the severity of childhood adversity alone, highlighting predictability as an important feature of early development.
The study, “Reminiscences of Childhood Socioecological Contexts and Borderline Personality Traits: The Role of Perceived Harshness and Unpredictability,” was authored by Virgil Zeigler Hill, Jennifer Vonk, Megan Martini, Rene LeBlanc, Carly King, and Avi Besser.
