Investigating the impact of quality of object relations and psychological mindedness on the severity of personality disorder.

Abstract

Investigations of individual differences that contribute to the severity of personality dysfunction are necessary for informing clinical best practices. This study examines the influence of two individual difference variables-quality of object relations (QOR) and psychological mindedness (PM)-on the severity of personality disorder (PD). Specifically, PM was investigated as a moderator of the impact of QOR on PD severity. The sample comprised 138 consecutively admitted outpatients participating in a partial hospitalization evening treatment program, all of whom presented with significant personality dysfunction. QOR emerged as having a significant effect on PD severity, which was significantly moderated by PM. Simple slopes analysis indicated that the association between low QOR (representing more dysfunctional object relations) and PD severity became less pronounced as PM increased from low to high, suggesting a compensatory effect of PM. Implications of the findings for understanding the development of severe PD and clinical practice are considered.

Knowing me, knowing you: A systematic review of object relations assessment.

“…Lindfors et al (2013) report good reliability and validity as evaluated in psychotherapy trials, but point out that the studies have been carried out by only one research team in Canada, limiting the generalizability of the results. The QORS has recently been used to investigate individual differences contributing to personality disorder severity (Joyce et al, 2022) and as a possible predictor of outcomes in short- and long-term psychotherapy (Lindfors et al, 2013). The QORS has also been used in the study of the effect of transference interpretation in dynamic psychotherapy (Høglend et al, 2011) and to investigate the utilization of psychotherapy in patients with personality disorders (Löffler-Stastka et al, 2005).…”

“…Test–retest reliability for the SCORS-G variables ranges from small ( r = .30) to medium ( r = .52; Ridenour et al, 2022). The SCORS-G has been used to assess changes in ORs over the course of psychotherapy (e.g., Mullin et al, 2017), to assess the Level of Personality Functioning in the context of Criterion A of the AMPD (Garcia et al, 2021), to investigate the role of quality of ORs in the severity of personality dysfunction (Joyce et al, 2022), and in many other studies to investigate ORs in depth and complexity. We point out that a study exploring the convergence of the SCORS-G across early memories and psychotherapy narratives (Slavin-Mulford et al, 2020) found that only three out of eight dimensions significantly correlated with themselves across narrative types; therefore, it looks like different narrative sources tend to activate different aspects of ORs.…”