Mindreading and metacognition patterns in patients with borderline personality disorder: experimental study

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psychopathology
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Current psychopathology links personality disorders to deficits in higher cognition, specifically mindreading and metacognition.
• Mindreading involves understanding and attributing mental states to others, while metacognition concerns self-monitoring and control of cognitive processes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate metacognitive judgment accuracy in individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) during a mindreading task.
• To analyze self-reported confidence in metacognitive judgments using confidence rating and post-decision wagering scales.

Main Methods:

• Participants with BPD and a control group completed the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) for mindreading assessment.
• Metacognitive accuracy was evaluated using confidence ratings (CR) and post-decision wagering (PDW) scales following RMET performance.

Main Results:

• Individuals with BPD demonstrated lower accuracy on the RMET compared to the control group.
• Both groups showed similar confidence levels on the PDW scale for incorrect RMET answers.
• Individuals with BPD consistently overestimated their confidence in incorrect answers across both metacognitive scales.

Conclusions:

• Borderline personality disorder is associated with significant deficits in mindreading abilities.
• Individuals with BPD exhibit metacognitive dysfunction, specifically overestimating their performance accuracy.
• These findings highlight a pattern of dysfunctional interplay between mindreading and metacognition in BPD.