Relations of Maternal Borderline Personality Disorder Features With Preschooler Executive Functioning and Theory of Mind

Abstract

Although children of mothers who have elevated borderline personality disorder (BPD) features are a high-risk group, there remains little research examining developmental mechanisms that place these offspring at risk for emerging psychopathology. The current study included 68 mother–preschooler dyads, in which mothers with elevated BPD features were oversampled. Preschoolers (aged 3 and 4 years) completed a battery of executive functioning (EF) and theory of mind (ToM) measures. Accounting for several covariates (family income, maternal depression, child age, and child cognitive ability), maternal BPD features were associated with preschoolers' poorer EF and, although not associated with the overall ToM measure, were associated with affect perspective taking, a component of ToM.

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

“…Emotion knowledge was measured using an adapted version of the Affective Perspective Taking task (Denham, 1986;Pears & Moses, 2003;Zalewski, Musser, Binion, Lewis, & O'Brien, 2020). Prior to task initiation, children were shown four emotional faces (happy, sad, mad/angry, scared/afraid) and were instructed to identify all emotions both expressively, then receptively (by pointing).…”

Comorbidity and heterogeneity: Two challenges for personality pathology research.

“…BOR had correlations ≥.60 with several other PAI scales—including Aggression, Anxiety, Anxiety-Related Disorders, Depression, Paranoia, Schizophrenia, and Stress—in both samples. In addition, studies in our database reported that the PAI-BOR scale correlated .66 (Zalewski et al, 2020) and .69 (Dixon-Gordon & Laws, 2021) with depressive symptoms, and .60 with an indicator of internalizing psychopathology (Kerr et al, 2021).…”