Az orvos-, egészségtudományi- és gyógyszerészképzés tudományos műhelyeinek fejlesztése(EFOP-3.6.3-VEKOP-16-2017-00009)
Támogató: EFOP-VEKOP
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.
