Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
New researchTheory of Mind and Emotion Regulation Difficulties in Adolescents With Borderline Traits
Section snippets
Participants
All consecutive admissions (N = 132) to the Adolescent Treatment Program of a private tertiary care inpatient treatment facility were approached to participate in the study. The adolescent unit specializes in the evaluation and stabilization of adolescents who failed to respond to previous interventions. Inclusion criteria were ages between 12 and 17 years, English as a first language, and admission to the unit. A total of 21 subjects were excluded from the final analyses because of declining
Descriptive Statistics
Means, standard deviations, and ranges for all main study variables are summarized in Table 1.
Relation Between Mentalizing and Borderline Traits
Bivariate correlations between study variables are summarized in Table 2.
Table 2 shows that borderline traits were positively correlated with both Axis I (internalizing and externalizing problems) and psychopathic traits. Borderline traits were negatively correlated with the total ToM score (indicating reduced overall ToM/mentalizing capacity associated with increased borderline traits), which was
Discussion
This study is the first to use a ToM task that resembled the demands of everyday-life social cognition41 to examine mentalizing difficulties in relation to borderline traits in adolescents. Although other studies have investigated aspects of emotional processing in borderline youth,77 ours is the first to use a task specifically developed to assess mentalizing impairment in psychiatric disorder by considering potential dysfunctions of mentalizing such as insufficient mental state reasoning
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Funding for the research was provided by the Child and Family Program at the Menninger Clinic.
Disclosure: Dr. Sharp has received financial support from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression Young Investigator Award, the Child and Family Program of the Menninger Clinic, a University of Houston Small Grant, and the South African Responsible Gambling Foundation. Dr. Fonagy has received financial support from the United Kingdom Department of Health, the Central and East London Comprehensive Local Research Network Program support for Systemic Therapy for At Risk Teens (START), the UK National Institute of Health Research Research for Patient Benefit Program, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence to British Psychological Society, the Hope for Depression Foundation, the UK Department for Children, Schools, and Families, and the UK National Health Technology Assessment program. Ms. Ha, Ms. Pane, Ms. Venta, and Drs. Patel and Sturek report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.
This article is discussed in an editorial by Drs. Marianne Goodman and Larry J. Siever on page 536.
Supplemental material cited in this article is available online.