Evaluation of emotion awareness, level of emotion regulation difficulty and attachment styles of individuals experiencing border personality features

In this study, it is aimed to examine the emotional awareness and emotion dysregulation in relation to the attachment styles of individuals with varied border personality features and to evaluate the mediating role of emotion regulation and emotional awareness in the relationship between attachment styles and border personality features. The sample of the study consisted of 247 university students with undergraduate and graduate education. It was observed that the participants were between the ages of 18-28 (SD = 1.87), 239 of them were undergraduate (96.8%) and 7 of them were graduate (2.8%). In addition, 217 women (87.9%) were male and 30 (12.1%) were male. Demographic Information Form was used to evaluate demographic information, Borderline Personality Inventory (BPI) was used to assess borderline personality feature levels, The Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) was used to determine the levels of emotional awareness, Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale-Brief Form (DERS-16) was used to evaluate emotion dysregulation levels and Relationships Scales Questionnaire (RSQ) was used to evaluate attachment styles. For the first purpose of the study, groups with different levels of border personality features were compared with MANOVA in terms of emotion awareness and emotion dysregulation by considering attachment styles. It was found that the level of emotion awareness was lower and the emotion dysregulation levels were higher in the group with higher borderline personality features when compared with lower borderline personality features. There was no difference in the emotional awareness level in the differentiation of attachment styles, but it was found that there were differences in terms of emotion dysregulation. The group with a preoccupied attachment style exhibits higher levels of emotion dysregulation when compared with secure and dismissing attachment style. When borderline personality feature levels and attachment styles are considered together, it is concluded that they do not differ in terms of emotion awareness and emotion dysregulation. For the second purpose of the study, the role of emotion awareness and emotion regulation mediator between the attachment styles and the border personality feature was investigated. Difficulty of emotion regulation among the safe and preoccupied attachment styles have been found to play the role of full mediator among the border personality feature. It was observed that the mediating role of emotion awareness was not within the confidence interval between fearful attachment style and borderline personality feature, while emotion dysregulation was partially mediated role. In terms of dismissing attachment style, because there was not statistically significant correlation between dismissing attachment style, emotional awareness and emotion dysregulation, dismissing attachment style did not interpret in mediator analyse. The findings of the study were discussed in the light of the related literature and the findings of the study were stated.