Study finds unpredictable childhood environments are linked to borderline personality traits in adulthood

People who remembered their childhoods as unstable and unpredictable reported more emotional, interpersonal, impulsive, and dissociative borderline traits in adulthood, according to research published in Evolutionary Psychological Science.

Borderline personality pathology involves a diverse collection of difficulties, including emotional instability, impulsivity, interpersonal conflict, and disruptions in identity and self-regulation. Researchers increasingly examine these characteristics as traits that vary continuously across the population rather than treating borderline personality disorder as an all-or-nothing diagnosis.

Although childhood abuse, neglect, invalidation, and other adverse experiences have consistently been associated with borderline pathology, previous research has largely focused on specific events or cumulative adversity rather than the broader structure of a person’s childhood environment.

Virgil Zeigler-Hill and colleagues examined whether borderline traits are linked not only to the severity of childhood adversity, but also to the stability of the broader childhood environment. Drawing on life history theory, they distinguished harshness, which refers to chronic hardship such as resource scarcity or persistent threat, from unpredictability, which refers to instability in caregiving, routines, and family circumstances.

The researchers investigated how these conditions were related to four components of borderline personality: neurotic traits involving negative emotions and emotional volatility, antagonistic traits involving hostility and interpersonal conflict, disinhibited traits involving impulsivity and poor behavioural control, and dissociative traits involving identity confusion and feelings of unreality.

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Zeigler-Hill and colleagues conducted three studies involving 4,993 participants altogether. Study 1 included a final sample of 529 U.S. adults recruited through Prolific, Study 2 included 2,478 undergraduate students from a large Midwestern U.S. university, Study 3 included 1,986 Israeli adults recruited through public advertisements and social media. The Israeli survey materials were translated into Hebrew and then independently translated back into English to check their accuracy.

Participants completed the Perceived Childhood Harshness and Unpredictability Scale. The 11-item harshness subscale assessed chronic material and environmental hardship, such as financial strain, whereas the 15-item unpredictability subscale assessed instability in family life and daily routines. They also completed measures of neurotic, antagonistic, disinhibited, and dissociative borderline traits. Studies 1 and 3 used the Five-Factor Borderline Inventory-Super Short Form, while Study 2 used the longer Five-Factor Borderline Inventory-Short Form. The researchers then examined how each childhood condition was related to the four borderline traits, whether harshness altered the association between unpredictability and those traits, and whether these patterns differed between men and women.

Across all three samples, perceived childhood unpredictability was consistently associated with higher levels of every borderline trait examined. People who remembered their childhood environments as more unstable and inconsistent tended to report greater emotional volatility and distress, more hostility and interpersonal conflict, more impulsive behaviour, and more dissociative experiences. These relationships emerged in the U.S. community sample, the U.S. student sample, and the Israeli community sample, suggesting that the pattern was not limited to one age group, recruitment method, or national context.

The researchers had predicted that childhood unpredictability would be associated with neurotic, antagonistic, and disinhibited borderline traits. Although its relationship with dissociative traits was examined without a specific prediction, unpredictability was also consistently associated with higher dissociative traits across the three studies.

Childhood harshness produced a much less straightforward pattern. It was modestly related to borderline traits when considered by itself, but these relationships frequently became nonsignificant or slightly negative once unpredictability was considered at the same time. Harshness also altered the relationship between unpredictability and all four borderline traits.

In the two U.S. samples, unpredictability generally had the strongest association with borderline traits among people who reported relatively low childhood harshness; the differences were smaller in the Israeli sample. The authors suggest that a consistently harsh environment may still contain more stable and understandable contingencies than an environment that changes unpredictably, although they emphasized that this does not make harsh conditions beneficial.

Gender differences were inconsistent, such that the link between unpredictability and antagonistic traits was stronger among men in the two U.S. studies but not in Israel, while there was a stronger link with disinhibited traits among men only in the student sample.

Of note is that these studies were correlational and asked adults to remember their childhood environments, thus, they cannot establish that childhood unpredictability caused later borderline traits; current personality and mood may also affect how childhood is recalled. As well, the exclusive reliance on self-report measures, the use of nonclinical samples, 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 to other cultural settings.

Overall, these findings suggest that the instability and inconsistency of childhood environments may be more closely connected to diverse borderline personality traits than the severity of childhood hardship alone, highlighting predictability as an important feature of early development.

The research, “Recollections of Childhood Socioecological Conditions and Borderline Personality Traits: The Roles of Perceived Harshness and Unpredictability,” was authored by Virgil Zeigler-Hill, Jennifer Vonk, Meghan Martini, Renee LeBlanc, Carly King, and Avi Besser.