Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is associated with emotion dysregulation. The emotion regulation strategies people adopt may depend on one’s belief about emotion as either fixed or changeable (termed “implicit theory”). We test this experimentally by modifying beliefs about emotions using virtual reality (VR). A sample of 29 adolescents (ages 14–17 years) were recruited from two adolescent inpatient units for an uncontrolled pilot trial of a new brief intervention. We measured BPD traits, beliefs about emotion, treatment preference, cognitive reappraisal and rumination, before the VR game and 14–31 days later. Adolescents with higher levels of BPD traits endorsed fixed beliefs of emotion and reported higher levels of rumination and lower levels of cognitive reappraisal. After a one-time message delivered via VR, adolescents evidenced an increase in belief that their emotions were changeable. These findings suggest beliefs about emotions may have an important role in interventions for adolescents with BPD traits.

边缘性人格障碍（BPD）与情绪失调有关。人们采用的情绪调节策略可能取决于人们对情绪的看法，信念是固定的还是可变的（称为“内隐理论”）。我们通过使用虚拟现实（VR）修改有关情感的信念来进行实验性测试。从两个青少年住院病房招募了29名青少年（14至17岁）的样本，用于一项新的简短干预措施的无对照试验。在VR游戏之前和14-31天之后，我们测量了BPD特质，对情绪的信念，治疗偏好，认知重新评估和反省。具有较高BPD特质的青少年认可固定的情绪信念，并报告较高的反省水平和较低的认知再评估水平。在通过VR传递一次消息后，青少年证明了自己的情绪多变的信念有所增加。这些发现表明，关于情绪的信念可能在干预具有BPD特征的青少年中起重要作用。