Combining novel trait and neurocognitive frameworks to parse heterogeneity in borderline personality disorder.

OBJECTIVE: Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) diagnosis comprises several constellations of trait, neurocognitive, and psychosocial alterations. Dimensional models of psychopathology provide new opportunities to parse heterogeneity and create a stronger interface between individual characterization and psychosocial outcomes. However, dimensional models have focused on either traits or neurocognitive features, lacking integration to capture the multifaceted nature of BPD. METHOD: We assessed 100 participants with BPD using a combination of tools stemming from trait (Alternative Model for Personality Disorders) and neurocognitive models (Research Domain Criteria; RDoC) to examine if trait-derived subgroups display distinctive social-processing and psychosocial profiles. We used two complementary analytical approaches: person-centered (k-means clustering) and construct-based (multiple factor analysis). RESULTS: Our person-centered approach identified four subgroups with separable internalizing, detached, externalizing, and low psychopathology trait profiles. These profiles revealed distinctive patterns of affiliation, emotion recognition and mentalization performance in RDoC tasks, and psychosocial measures of quality of life and social connectedness. RDoC-based measures showed close construct proximity with negative affectivity, disinhibition, and antagonism trait domains, relative to the detachment domain, which had close proximity with self-knowledge. CONCLUSIONS: Altogether, findings support consilience between trait-based and neurobiological frameworks and suggest that trait models are useful to parse BPD heterogeneity leading to unique social functioning profiles.

Impact of adolescent methamphetamine use on social cognition: A human-mice reverse translation study.

BACKGROUND: Methamphetamine dependence is associated with social cognition deficits that may underpin negative social outcomes. However, there are considerable inter-individual differences in social cognition within people with methamphetamine dependence, with age of onset of methamphetamine use being a potential contributing factor. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We conducted two sequential studies examining the link between age of onset of methamphetamine use (adolescence versus young adulthood) and performance in social cognition tests: (1) a human cross-sectional study in 95 participants with methamphetamine dependence varying in age of onset (38 with adolescent onset and 57 with adult onset) and 49 drug-naïve controls; (2) a mice study in which we tested the effects of methamphetamine exposure during adolescence versus young adulthood on social interaction and aggression, and their potential neurochemical substrates in the striatal dopaminergic system. RESULTS: We initially showed that people with methamphetamine dependence who started use in adolescence had higher antisocial beliefs (p = 0.046, Cohen's d=0.42) and worse emotion recognition (p = 0.031, Cohen's d=0.44) than those who started use during adulthood. We reasoned that this could be due to either social cognition deficits leading to earlier onset of methamphetamine use, or methamphetamine-induced neuroadaptive effects specific to adolescence. Mice experiments showed that methamphetamine exposure during adolescence specifically decreased social investigation during social interaction and upregulated striatal tyrosine hydroxylase (p < 0.05, Bonferroni corrected). There was no evidence of adolescent-specific methamphetamine effects on aggression or other measures of dopaminergic function. CONCLUSION: Together, translational findings demonstrate heightened sensitivity to methamphetamine effects on social cognition during adolescence.

Latent classes of maladaptive personality traits exhibit differences in social processing.

OBJECTIVE: Social processing (SP) deficits manifest across numerous mental disorders. However, this research has been plagued by heterogeneity and a piecemeal approach whereby skills are examined in isolation rather than as part of an integrated cognitive system. Here, we combined two dimensional frameworks of psychopathology to address these limitations. METHOD: We utilized the Alternative Model for Personality Disorders (AMPD) to distill trait-related heterogeneity within a community sample (n = 200), and the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) 'Systems for Social Processes' to comprehensively assess SP. We first applied latent class analyses (LCA) to derive AMPD-based groups and subsequently contrasted the performance of these groups on a SP test battery that we developed to align with the RDoC SP constructs. RESULTS: Our LCA yielded four distinct subgroups. The recognizable trait profiles and psychopathological symptoms of these classes suggested they were clinically meaningful. The subgroups differed in their SP profiles: one displayed deficits regarding the self, a second displayed deficits in understanding others, a third displayed more severe deficits including affiliation problems, whilst the fourth showed normal performance. CONCLUSIONS: Our results support the link between clusters of maladaptive personality traits and distinctive profiles of SP deficits, which may inform research on disorders involving SP dysfunctions.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of 'Systems for Social Processes' in borderline personality and substance use disorders.

Deficits in social processing (SP) have been proposed to underpin interpersonal dysfunction in both Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and Substance Use Disorders (SUD). This study aimed to explore potential transdiagnostic cognitive and behavioral phenotypes of these disorders utilizing the NIMH Research Domain Criteria 'Systems for Social Processes'. A systematic review and meta-analysis of the published research was conducted on 134 studies identified through our database searches. Four meta-analyses were conducted, which revealed significant overlapping deficits in the ability to identify facial emotions and infer the mental states of others in both BPD and SUD. Further, people with BPD displayed a higher ostracism effect following perceived social exclusion. Systematically reviewed studies also revealed significant dysfunction amongst individuals with BPD and SUD across both self and other SP constructs, which were broadly similar in magnitude. Taken together, these results support the proposition that SP dysfunction may be considered a core transdiagnostic phenotype of BPD and SUD.

Dysfunctional personality beliefs and emotion recognition in individuals with methamphetamine dependence.

Previous studies have demonstrated that individuals with methamphetamine dependence have impaired emotion recognition. However, heterogeneity in results from these studies may indicate that individual factors such as personality beliefs moderate emotion recognition deficits. Thus, we aimed to examine the relationship between dimensional estimates of dysfunctional personality beliefs and facial emotion recognition in 86 Australian treatment seekers with methamphetamine dependence. Dysfunctional beliefs were measured using the Personality Beliefs Questionnaire, and emotion recognition was measured with the Ekman's Faces Test. We applied hierarchical regression analyses to test the relationship between beliefs and emotion recognition after accounting for the effects of intelligence. Results indicated that personality beliefs reflecting antisocial and paranoid schemas together accounted for a significant increase in the variance in fear recognition (higher levels of beliefs associated with poorer fear recognition). Further, high levels of passive-aggressive personality beliefs were associated with a tendency to misclassify faces as disgust. Our findings suggest that antisocial, paranoid, and passive-aggressive dysfunctional personality beliefs may underlie inter-individual differences in emotion recognition in methamphetamine dependent individuals. Additional research is required to better understand the relationship between personality and social processing biases, and investigate the direct impact these have on the significant psychosocial impairments present in individuals with methamphetamine dependence.