Personality Disorders and Mindreading

Abstract

The capacity of understanding mental states is a complex function which involves several components. Single components can be selectively impaired in specific clinical populations. It has been suggested that impairments in mindreading are central for borderline personality disorder (BPD). However, empirical findings are inconsistent, and it is debatable whether BPD presents a specific profile of mindreading impairments. The aim of this study is to compare BPD and other PDs in mindreading. Seventy-two patients with BPD and 125 patients with other PD diagnoses were assessed using the Metacognition Assessment Interview. BPD showed difficulties in two mindreading functions, differentiation and integration, even when the severity of psychopathology was controlled. These results suggest a specific mindreading impairment in BPD and a strong relationship between these impairments and the severity of psychopathology.

You ≠ me: individual differences in the structure of social cognition

“…Importantly, PSI theory is informed by neurobiological data (Baumann, Kuhl, & Kazén, 2005; see Kuhl & Quirin, 2011) and supported by behavioural evidence (Jostmann, & Koole, 2007;Kazén, Kuhl, & Quirin, 2015;Koole & Fockenberg, 2011;Quirin, Bode, & Kuhl, 2011). Furthermore, since the functional basis of relationships between affective and cognitive systems is the same for personality styles and disorders, PSI theory permits parallels to be drawn between healthy and clinical populations; it allows us to build upon the recent findings of specific impairments to social cognition in different personality disorders (Moroni et al, 2016;Semerari et al, 2014Semerari et al, , 2015 by identifying subgroups of non-clinical individuals with similar profiles of personality style.…”

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

“…Future research is needed to investigate how executive dysfunction might be associated with, or even drive the impairments to social cognition that we have observed in the present study. Finally, existing evidence indicates the importance of symptom severity in understanding socio-cognitive disturbances in this patient population (Semerari et al, 2014(Semerari et al, , 2015Moroni et al, 2016), but global psychopathology was not measured in the present study protocol. It is unknown, therefore, whether any of the disturbances to social cognition we have revealed are associated with indices of symptom severity, such as global severity index.…”

“…Firstly, the capacity of this simple experimental task to differentiate between the MPD, AD, and non-clinical groups presents an important novel contribution to the literature on social cognition in PD. Poorer perspectivetaking performance may provide an important index of dysfunction to a fundamental cognitive domain in this psychiatric population; patients with Avoidant PD demonstrate difficulties in suppressing their own perspective in order to adopt that of another ("decentration";Dimaggio et al, 2009;Moroni et al, 2016), and those with Borderline PD express problems in distinguishing between internal psychological content and objective reality ("differentiation";Semerari et al, 2014Semerari et al, , 2015. In this light, perspective taking in PD might reveal dissociable patterns of impairment to selfother distinction (SOD); when faced with conflicting selfand other-representations, patients with MPD appear to default to an egocentric self-bias while the hyper-mentalizing observed in Borderline PD suggests the reverse altercentric bias (Semerari et al, 2014).…”

“…The dimensional approach to PD could also elucidate other important mechanisms behind social cognitive dysfunction; for example, difficulties in specific socio-cognitive abilities might be driven by symptoms such as social withdrawal and emotional instability that result from the altered personality emerging across multiple PDs (Hopwood et al, 2011;Semerari et al, 2014Semerari et al, , 2015Moroni et al, 2016). Importantly, many discrete PD diagnostic groups display high comorbidity with anxiety and depression (Friborg et al, 2013;Kret and Ploeger, 2015), particularly Cluster C pathologies such as Avoidant, Dependent and Obsessive-Compulsive PD (Friborg et al, 2013).…”

Consciousness and Social Cognition from an Interactionist Perspective: A New Approach on Understanding Normal and Abnormal Relations between Metacognition and Mindreading

“…Nonetheless, the present article considers a more complex cognitive architecture of social cognition that may possibly underline the dysfunctional interaction between mindreading and metacognitive capacities. For example, recent clinical studies on various causes of mental disorders identify abnormal patterns of recognition and attribution of mental states either to themselves or others in patients suffering from schizophrenia [20,21], social phobia [10], as well as patients diagnosed with borderline personality disorders (BDP) [22,23]. It is important to emphasize that new approaches to conceptualization of the interaction between metacognition and mindreading become important not only for understanding abnormal social cognition but also for finding effective treatments of mental disorders and offering appropriate psychological care to patients.…”