Although borderline symptoms show a normative decline throughout adulthood, severe psychosocial impairment often remains. Identifying personality pathology in college‐age students may help prevent “adaptive failure” that can occur during the critical period of development from puberty through the late 20s and thus reduce impairment later in life. The aims of the current study were to estimate the prevalence of borderline personality disorder (BPD) in a diverse college sample, determine which symptoms confer the greatest relative risk of screening positive for BPD and examine the utility of the Personality Inventory for DSM‐5 brief form (PID‐5‐BF) in identifying BPD. Participants were 1456 undergraduate students, and 312 individuals (21.4% of the sample) screened positive for BPD. Chronic feelings of emptiness conferred the greatest relative risk of any symptom; students who endorsed this symptom were 15 times more likely to screen positive for BPD than those who did not. Scales and composite scores of the PID‐5‐BF demonstrated diagnostic accuracy ranging from sufficient to excellent. The current study contributes to literature concerning best practices in screening for personality pathology in young adults. Results suggest that chronic feelings of emptiness are significant for detecting at‐risk students and implications for the use of the PID‐5‐BF are discussed.

Background:Interpersonal trust is an important target for the conceptualization, identification, and treatment of psychiatric disorders marked by interpersonal difficulties. A core feature of adolescent externalising disorders is interpersonal impairment. However, research investigating trust is scarce. A relatively novel approach for studying trust in psychopathology is through examination of social decision making using behavioural economic games. Objective: To employ a modified trust game in order to determine whether externalising adolescents exhibit perturbed decision making in social and/or nonsocial contexts. Methods: Externalising inpatient adolescents (n = 141) and non-externalising psychiatric controls (n = 122) completed selfreport measures of psychopathology and invested in an iterative trust game played under two conditions: social (trust) and nonsocial (lottery condition), each consisting of five consecutive trials. Results: Externalising adolescents showed a limited increase in trust investments, compared to a significant increase in lottery investments, across early game trials relative to psychiatric controls. This significant three-way interaction between experimental group, game condition, and trials became most evident at the second trial of games. Between-group differences on trust investments were non-significant. However, externalising adolescents invested significantly less in the trust relative to lottery condition, an effect unobserved in psychiatric controls. Conclusions:This study tentatively suggests that adolescent externalising disorders may be associated with an insensitivity to normative social exchange which may arise, in part, from a lack of anticipated co-player reciprocity. It is not the level of trust that may distinguish externalising adolescents but perhaps the form of which the trust exchange takes shape. Conclusions are tempered by the fact that the employed trust game did not include feedback in the form of co-player repayments.

Objective: Preliminary work indicates one specific aspect of emotion dysregulation (i.e., limited access to emotion regulation strategies) uniquely associates with adolescent suicide ideation. An optimal score cut point on a measure of this emotion dysregulation impairment has been identified to indicate risk for past-year suicidal ideation. Examining types of child abuse and neglect associated with being above cut-off on this measure may point to interactive environmental effects associated with subsequent risk for suicidal ideation. The primary aim of this study was to investigate the relations between multiple types of child abuse and neglect with being above cutoff on a measure of limited access to emotion regulation strategies in a psychiatrically severe adolescent sample.Method: The full sample included 203 psychiatric adolescents (Mean age = 15.31 years; 66.5% female; 74.4% White), assigned to two groups: (1) those at or above cutoff on the access to emotion regulation strategies subscale (n = 139); and (2) those below cutoff (n = 64).Results: Significant differences were only evidenced between the emotion regulation cutoff groups on emotional abuse, after covarying for other types of abuse and neglect; significant group differences were not evidenced on any other type of abuse or neglect (sexual or physical abuse, emotional or physical neglect).Conclusion: Relative to other types of abuse and neglect, emotional abuse may be differentially related to experiencing limited access to emotion regulation strategies, at the level indicative of suicide ideation risk. Clinical implications are discussed.

Background -Self-injurious behaviours (SIB) occur frequently in individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD). While multiple factors may explain the association between SIB and BPD, studies in adults have pointed to dissociation as factor worth considering. However, this relationship has not been examined in adolescents.Aims -The current study investigated the role of dissociation as a potential moderator between borderline features and SIB, with the expectation that this association would be stronger in the presence of dissociation. Methods -One hundred forty-four adolescent inpatients were compared on measures of BPD, non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) and suicidal behaviour. The relationships between borderline features and self-injury outcomes were evaluated using linear and logistic regression with dissociation as a moderator. Results -Borderline features and dissociation were found to be significantly associated with history of NSSI, history of suicide attempt, suicidal ideation (SI) intensity and SI severity. However, dissociation was a significant moderator only in the relationship between borderline features and SI intensity. Conclusion -Higher levels of dissociation were associated with more engagement with suicidal thoughts but did not necessarily contribute to SIB. Further research into differential patterns of association of self-injury in patients with BPD may investigate other models where dissociation may more strongly factor into outcomes.

No abstract