Examining the Relationship Between Executive Functions and Mentalizing Abilities of Patients With Borderline Personality Disorder

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Nándor Németh¹  Ágnes Péterfalvi²  Boldizsár Czéh¹  Tamás Tényi³  Maria Simon¹ 

[1] Neurobiology of Stress Research Group, János Szentágothai Research Centre, University of Pécs;Department of Laboratory Medicine, Medical School, University of Pécs;Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Medical School, University of Pécs

关键词: borderline personality disorder;    mentalization;    alexithymia;    theory of mind;    Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test;    Faux Pas Test;    executive functioning;    symptom severity;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01583

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) experience interpersonal dysfunctions; therefore, it is important to understand their social functioning and the confounding factors. We aimed to investigate the mentalizing abilities and executive functioning (EF) of BPD patients and healthy subjects and to determine the relative importance of BPD diagnosis and EF in predicting mentalizing abilities while controlling for general IQ and comorbid symptom severity. Self-oriented mentalizing (operationalized as emotional self-awareness/alexithymia), other-oriented mentalizing [defined as theory of mind (ToM)], and several EF domains were examined in 18 patients with BPD and 18 healthy individuals. Decoding and reasoning subprocesses of ToM were assessed by standard tasks (Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test and Faux Pas Test, respectively). Relative to controls, BPD patients exhibited significant impairments in emotional self-awareness and ToM reasoning; however, their ToM decoding did not differ. Multivariate regression analyses revealed that comorbid psychiatric symptoms were negative predictors of alexithymia and ToM decoding. Remarkably, the diagnosis of BPD was a positive predictor of ToM decoding but negatively influenced reasoning. Moreover, EF had no impact on alexithymia, while better IQ, and EF predicted superior ToM reasoning. Despite the small sample size, our results provide evidence that there is a dissociation between mental state decoding and reasoning in BPD. Comorbid psychiatric symptoms could be considered as significant negative confounds of self-awareness and ToM decoding in BPD patients. Conversely, the impairment of ToM reasoning was closely related to the diagnosis of BPD itself but not to the severity of the psychopathology.

【 授权许可】

CC BY