Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Up to 90% of individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) engage in non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), significantly contributing to impairment in everyday functioning and a high level of health-care service utilization. Existing research suggests that individuals engage in NSSI to cope with overwhelming negative emotions in the absence of more adaptive emotion regulation skills. One component of emotion regulation is mindfulness, which consists of two underlying processes: (1) mindful awareness - the ability to notice, describe and be fully present with emotions, and (2) mindful acceptance - an open, nonjudgmental attitude to those emotions. Though evidence-based treatments, such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy, aim to reduce emotion dysregulation and thus NSSI by strengthening mindfulness in BPD patients, no research has precisely delineated the relationship between the different components of mindfulness and NSSI. This proposal examines the relationship between reported acts of NSSI and both components of mindfulness (i.e., awareness and acceptance) in a formally diagnosed sample of individuals with BPD. It is hypothesized that mindful acceptance will have a greater association with reported acts of NSSI, when controlling for mindful awareness. Understanding the factors that lead to NSSI will facilitate the development of more effective treatments and, ultimately, lower health care utilization by individuals with BPD.