Can you trust this source? Advice taking in borderline personality disorder

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Psychiatry
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is associated with cognitive biases similar to psychosis.
• BPD often involves dysfunctional social interactions, suggesting reasoning biases may be heightened in social contexts.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate cognitive biases in borderline personality disorder (BPD) within a social judgment task.
• To compare the information-seeking and -integration strategies of BPD patients and healthy controls.

Main Methods:

• Utilized the Judge-Advisor System with participants estimating age and hostility from photos.
• Assessed participants' information seeking, advice utilization, confidence, and final judgments.
• Compared BPD patients (n=38) with healthy controls (n=30).

Main Results:

• Contrary to hypotheses, BPD patients and controls showed similar patterns in seeking, evaluating, and integrating advice.
• BPD patients demonstrated equal confidence and decision-making processes compared to controls.
• Patients with BPD assigned significantly higher hostility ratings to individuals in the photos.

Conclusions:

• Patients with BPD do not exhibit cognitive biases in processing social information or advice.
• Findings suggest that emotional biases, rather than cognitive biases, may be more prominent in BPD.
• Cognitive biases could still be potential treatment targets for managing emotional responses in social interactions.