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In:Emotion in Language: Theory – research – application
Edited by Ulrike M. Lüdtke
[Consciousness & Emotion Book Series 10] 2015
► pp. 399–420

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What words can’t tell:

Emotion and connection between ‘borderline’ mothers and infants

 | Laboratoire de Recherche en Psychiatrie et en Psychopathologie, EPS Erasme
 | Laboratoire de Recherche en Psychiatrie et en Psychopathologie, EPS Erasme
 | Laboratoire de Recherche en Psychiatrie et en Psychopathologie, EPS Erasme
 | Laboratoire de Recherche en Psychiatrie et en Psychopathologie, EPS Erasme
Published online: 16 December 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ceb.10.20gra
This paper investigates the particularities of vocal communication between mothers who suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and their young infants. One of the characteristic signs of BPD is a marked difficulty in sustaining long-term interpersonal relationships. Social interactions between mothers with BPD and their 3-month-old infants were found to include less infant participation, longer interruptions, more repetition and unvoiced sounds. The study presented in this paper highlights prosodic specificities in BPD mothers’ speech to infants as well as a lack of sensitivity to infants’ emotional states reflected in the content of mothers’ speech. It sheds light on the role of shared emotion in enabling the first forms of human social interaction, before infants can speak.
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