Dissociating Profiles of Social Cognitive Disturbances Between Mixed Personality and Anxiety Disorder

Abstract

Background: An emerging body of research has begun to elucidate disturbances to social cognition in specific personality disorders (PDs). No research has been conducted on patients with Mixed Personality Disorder (MPD), however, who meet multiple diagnostic criteria. Further, very few studies have compared social cognition between patients with PD and those presenting with symptomatic diagnoses that cooccur with personality pathologies, such as anxiety disorder (AD). The aim of this study was to provide a detailed characterization of deficits to various aspects of social cognition in MPD and dissociate impairments specific to MPD from those exhibited by patients with AD who differ in the severity of personality pathology.Method: Building on our previous research, we administered a large battery of self-report and performance-based measures of social cognition to age-, sex-and education-matched groups of patients with MPD or AD, and healthy control participants (HCs; n = 29, 23, and 54, respectively). This permitted a detailed profiling of these clinical groups according to impairments in emotion recognition and regulation, imitative control, low-level visual perspective taking, and empathic awareness and expression.Results: The MPD group demonstrated poorer emotion recognition for negative facial expressions relative to both HCs and AD. Compared with HCs, both clinical groups also performed significantly worse in visual perspective taking and interference resolution, and reported higher personal distress when empathizing and more state-oriented emotion regulation. Conclusion:We interpret our results to reflect dysfunctional cognitive control that is common to patients with both MPD and AD. Given the patterns of affective dispositions that characterize these two diagnostic groups, we suggest that prolonged negative affectivity is associated with inflexible styles of emotion regulation and attribution. This might potentiate the interpersonal dysfunction exhibited in MPD, particularly in negatively valenced and challenging social situations.

Seeing in my way or your way: impact of intelligence, attention, and empathy on brain reactivity

“…In contrast, they are known to be affected in patients with attention deficits syndrome ( Nilsen et al, 2013 ). High levels of egocentric interference has been also reported in narcissistic personality ( Bukowski and Samson, 2021 ) whereas lower performances in dPT were found in patients with mixed personality and anxiety disorders ( Czekoova et al, 2020 ; Shaw et al, 2020 ). In the present study of healthy controls, decreased fluid intelligence, levels of attention and inhibitory control but also worst identification and expression of emotions as well as decreased social cognition abilities impact negatively on brain reactivity during dPT.…”

Emotional and socio-cognitive processing in young children with symptoms of anxiety

“…First, given the nature of our design, we are unable to draw firm conclusions about the direction of the observed relationship. We proposed that the more frequent and more intense negative affectivity that typifies those with anxiety symptoms may give rise to an inflexible style of processing socio-cognitive and emotional information [ 4 ], which in turn, may exacerbate the interpersonal problems exhibited by children with anxiety disorders. However, there is also evidence that impairments in social cognitive processing (i.e.…”

“…Many children with anxiety disorders exhibit significant and persistent impairments in their social and interpersonal functioning [ 3 ]. It has been proposed that the prolonged negative affectivity that typifies anxiety may give rise to inflexible styles of processing emotional and socio-cognitive information [ 4 ], which can exacerbate these interpersonal problems. Having an understanding of one’s own and others’ mental states are socio-cognitive and emotional processes essential for successful social interaction [ 5 , 6 ].…”