Examination of facial emotion recognition skills and the factors affecting facial emotion recognition skills between individuals with neurotic personality organization and individuals with borderline personality organization

The concept of personality has been tried to be defined by different theorists to cover almost everything - physical, emotional, mental, social - related to the individual. In this context, Saydam defined personality as a psychic institution or device designed with the aim of defining and understanding the building blocks and dynamics that determine the 'original' internal functioning style of the subject, inferred from the individual's posture, expression, behavior and adaptation to the environment - in its more or less static integrity. In this context, personality disorder is evaluated as repetitive, permanent or persistent going beyond what is expected in the highlighted features. It is mentioned that the basic function of personality is to perceive, feel, think and combine them as purposeful behaviors. We can examine the concept of personality from many different perspectives such as biological, cognitive, behavioral, humanist, and psychoanalytic. According to Otto Kernberg, who comes from the psychoanalytic tradition, the psychic structures of individuals can be organized in three different ways as psychotic, borderline and neurotic personality organization. The personality organization categories developed by Kernberg are classified according to the availability of identity integrity, the quality of the defense mechanisms used, and the ability to evaluate reality. Kernberg pointed out that the personality organization of individuals who cannot tolerate anxiety, who cannot show consistency in their behaviors and thoughts, and who have creative capacity damage, is not a temporary situation that oscillates between neurosis and psychosis. He emphasized that the self-pathology of this group is different from that seen in neurosis and psychosis, and suggested defining the personality organization of these patients as 'borderline personality organization'. After their theoretical and clinical practice studies, Kernberg and his team created the IPO (inventory of personality organization) in 1995 in order to evaluate the personality organizations of individuals. Considering that individuals with different personality organizations experience different problems in interpersonal processes, it becomes even more meaningful to examine the factors that may affect these processes. In this context, it is prioritized in our study to determine the relationship between the factors affecting the ability to recognize facial emotion expression as an element of non-verbal communication, especially with personality organization levels, and many other factors such as duration, remembering, and learning. Emotions have an important place in our lives, such as recognizing our experiences, making sense of them, creating appropriate responses to them, making important decisions in the face of our experiences and guiding us in the stages of implementing the decisions we make. It is seen that emotion is not related to a specific region in the human brain, and on the contrary, brain structures interact with each other in multiple and complex interactions during emotion. Emotions are classified as both basic and complex, as well as positive and negative. According to Ekman's definition of basic emotion, there are 6 basic emotions as happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise and fear. Happiness is evaluated positively, anger, fear, sadness, disgust are evaluated negatively, and surprise is evaluated both positively and negatively. There is also a neutral facial expression that does not express any emotion. People use many ways of verbal and non-verbal emotion expression in order to communicate with each other in a healthy way. While speaking has the most important place in verbal communication, in non-verbal communication, body language including facial expressions, eye movements, body posture and voice characteristics has an important place. The concept of 'facial expressions' not only includes the movements of the mimetic muscles on the face, but also includes the associated emotions, cognition, and physiology. In addition to the various studies in the literature on the relationship of facial expressions with innate, cultural, universal or learning, there are also studies examining many other factors such as gender, physiological changes, and psychiatric diseases that affect facial expressions. Considering the universal or cultural nature of facial expression, various measurement tools have been developed by researchers. In our study, we did not use the universal photo set developed by Ekman, but a local set of photographs created by the facial expressions of people selected by Turan from the Turkish community. We have completed our study with a total of 60 people who have 30 borderline and 30 neurotic personality organizations. According to the results of the statistical analysis, we compared the factors that may affect the facial emotion recognition processes between the two groups. According to these results, facial emotion recognition scores of the borderline group were statistically significantly lower than the neurotic group, both at the first encounter and in the repetitive tests. The borderline group spent more time on faces when there was no time restriction, but therefore did not affect the emotion recognition process at a statistically significant level. In addition, the performance of remembering facial expressions of the borderline group was statistically significantly lower than the neurotic group. When emotional facial expressions were examined individually, there was no statistically significant difference between the recognition and recall of happy faces between the borderline group and the neurotic group, while there were statistically significant differences between the recognition and recall of neutral faces and other emotional facial expressions. Although some of our findings overlap with the previous results in the literature, there were also findings that did not overlap with the research results in the literature, and we tried to explain them on the theoretical ground of Kernberg's personality organizations in the discussion and conclusion section. Considering all these findings, results, inferences and evaluations, it can be thought that more comprehensive studies can be carried out in this field by increasing the number of participants in future studies, controlling many factors that are thought to be confounding, and providing adequate financial and technical support. We hope that our study will be a guide for future research in this respect.