Momentary borderline personality disorder symptoms in youth as a function of parental invalidation and youth‐perceived support

Abstract

Background: Parental invalidation is central to etiological models of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Previous studies relied on retrospective accounts or laboratory observations to examine these associations. There is a dearth of research assessing these constructs in daily life, and limited studies have tested the effect of parental invalidation on BPD symptoms during early adolescence, when BPD onsets. The current study took a dynamic approach to assess parents' validating and invalidating behavior and its effect on youths' BPD symptom expression in daily life, while accounting for parent-perceived helpfulness of these behaviors and youth-perceived support. Methods: A psychiatric sample of 162 early adolescents (age range = 10-14 years; 47% female) and their parent completed a four-day ecological momentary assessment study. Parents reported on the use of validating and invalidating (e.g. punishing and ignoring) behaviors during parent-child conflict, as well as perceived helpfulness of these behaviors. Youth reported on their BPD symptoms and perceived parental support. Multilevel models were used to test the betweenand within-person effects of parents' validating and invalidating behaviors, parent-perceived helpfulness and youthperceived support, and their interaction on youth's momentary expression of BPD symptoms. Results: At the between-person level, invalidating behaviors, specifically punishing behaviors, were related to greater BPD symptoms in daily life, while ignoring behaviors were associated with fewer BPD symptoms. Youth-perceived support predicted fewer BPD symptoms. Conclusions: Results underscore the importance of parental invalidation for the expression of BPD symptoms in daily life and also highlight the importance of youth's subjective experience of parental support. Findings are discussed in terms of etiological and intervention models that emphasize a dyadic framework.

Applying new RDoC dimensions to the development of emotion regulation: Examining the influence of maternal emotion regulation on within-individual change in child emotion regulation

“…For example, the transition to adolescence is another developmental period hallmarked by substantial neurobiological changes in systems underlying ER (Guyer, Silk, & Nelson, 2016;Steinberg & Morris, 2001), and this developmental period corresponds to the onset of various psychiatric disorders (Spear, 2009). Research suggests that the amplification of emotion during this period may necessitate prolonged emotional scaffolding (Guyer et al, 2016;Morris et al, 2017;Steinberg & Silk, 2002) and emerging work demonstrates that parental influences may exacerbate or mitigate ER difficulties (Byrd, Vine, Frigoletto, Vanwoerden, & Stepp, 2021) and emerging psychopathology (Vanwoerden et al, 2021). This further underscores the importance of incorporating what is known about developmental processes of interest into a well-defined RDoC dimension.…”

Daily manifestations of caregiver- and self-reported maladaptive personality traits in adolescent girls.

“…Adolescent-reports of personality pathology were further linked to elevated mean-levels as well as variability in daily experiences of boredom. In adult samples, boredom has been associated with arousal mechanisms that may plausibly lead to quarrelsomeness, but also to reckless behaviors, possibly due to poor affect-regulatory strategies (Miskewicz et al, 2015; Vanwoerden et al, 2022). This is the first time it has been demonstrated in the daily life of youth high in maladaptive personality pathology.…”

“…This builds on prior work investigating the daily manifestations of crosscutting dimensions of the DSM-5 personality disorder (PD) traits, suggesting that daily expressions of PDs in adults are highly variable, with half the total variability being associated with daily fluctuations (Wright & Simms, 2016). Similar work in youth at risk has just begun to emerge and has, for instance, advanced our understanding of the dynamics of anger-related difficulties (Scott et al, 2015) or the role of parental invalidation in momentary expressions of BPD symptoms (Vanwoerden et al, 2022).…”

Studying personality pathology with ecological momentary assessment: Harmonizing theory and method.

“…To date, very little EMA-based work exists on constructs beyond BPD, and relevant works are summarized in Tables S2 and S3 in the online supplemental materials. Research has only begun investigating the crosscutting dimensions of the DSM-5 PD traits (Roche, 2018) or developmental forms of personality pathology (Vanwoerden et al, 2021) as they manifest from day to day.…”