False memories and memory confidence in borderline patients

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

Research suggests that patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) share a range of cognitive biases with patients with psychosis. As the disorder often manifests in dysfunctional social interactions, we assumed associated reasoning styles would be exaggerated in a social setting. For the present study, we applied the Judge-Advisor System by asking participants to provide initial estimates of a person's age and presumed hostility based on a portrait photo. Afterwards, we presented additional cues/advice in the form of responses by anonymous previous respondents. Participants could revise their estimate, seek additional advice, or make a decision. Contrary to our preregistered hypothesis, patients with BPD (n = 38) performed similarly to healthy controls (n = 30). Patients sought the same number of pieces of advice, were equally confident, and used advice in similar ways to revise their estimates. Thus, patients with BPD did trust advice. However, patients gave higher hostility ratings to the portrayed persons. In conclusion, patients with BPD showed no cognitive biases in seeking, evaluating, and integrating socially provided information. While the study implies emotional rather than cognitive biases in the disorder, cognitive biases may still prove to be useful treatment targets in order to encourage delaying and reflecting on extreme emotional responses in social interactions.

False memory in posttraumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) have been associated with an increased generation of false memories. We aimed to disentangle disorder-specific false memory in individuals with PTSD and BPD using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. It measures the tendency to mistakenly remember stimuli that are associated with actually presented material, but have not been presented. Participants with BPD without comorbid PTSD (n = 32), participants with PTSD without comorbid BPD (n = 28), and mentally healthy controls (HC, n = 30) were given a word recognition test after hearing neutral, emotionally negative, BPD-related and PTSD-related word lists. Compared to HC, participants with PTSD showed fewer false memories for neutral word material and no other differences. Participants with BPD showed no differences in false memory formation compared to HC, only more false memories for a BPD-related and a PTSD-related word list compared to PTSD. Our results indicate, that in the absence of BPD, increased false memory in PTSD cannot be observed. In addition, our findings do not suggest that individuals with BPD and HC differ in their false memory formation. More trauma-individualized material should be used in future studies on false memory in PTSD.

Age differences in false memories for visual scenes and the effect of prior recall

This study investigated age differences in false memory for visual scenes and the effect of immediate recall on subsequent recognition. Eighty children (7–9 years), 74 adolescents (14–16 years), 92 young adults (19–26 years) and 82 older adults (50–80 years) studied four visual scenes and then took a recognition test after either a free-recall task or a filler task. Results showed an age-related decline in false recognition for visual scenes, but this trend was eliminated when participants were asked to free-recall before recognition. Prior recall decreased false recognition in children, but increased false recognition in older adults. Across the lifespan, adolescents had the loosest criterion, children had the lowest false recall, and prior recall increased true recognition in older adults.

Metacognitive Training for Depression (D-MCT) reduces false memories in depression. A randomized controlled trial

Metacognitive Training for Depression (D-MCT) is a highly standardized group program targeted at depression-related (“Beckian”) emotional as well as cognitive biases, including mood-congruent and false memory. While prior results are promising with respect to psychopathological outcomes (depression), it is unclear whether D-MCT also meets its goal of improving cognitive biases, such as false memories.

In the framework of a randomized controlled trial (registered trial, DRKS00007907), we investigated whether D-MCT is superior to an active control condition (health training, HT) in reducing the susceptibility of depressed patients for false memories. False memories were examined using parallel versions of a visual variant of the Deese-Roediger McDermott paradigm.

Both groups committed less false memories at post assessment after 4 weeks compared to baseline. Relative to HT, D-MCT led to a significant decrease in high-confident false memories over time.

The study presents first evidence that D-MCT decreases the susceptibility of depressed patients for false memories, particularly for errors made with high confidence that are presumably the most “toxic” in terms of mood-congruent memory distortions.

False Memory in Adults With ADHD: A Comparison Between Subtypes and Normal Controls

OBJECTIVES

To examine the performance on the Deese-Roediger-McDermott task of adults divided into ADHD subtypes and compares their performance to that of healthy controls to examine whether adults with ADHD are more susceptible to the production of false memories under experimental conditions.

METHOD

A total of 128 adults with ADHD (50% females), classified into three Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; DSM-IV-TR) subtypes, were compared with 48 controls.

RESULTS

The results indicated that the ADHD participants recalled and recognized fewer studied words than the controls, the ADHD groups produced more false memories than the control group, no differences in either the false positives or the false negatives. The ADHD-combined (ADHD-CT) group recognized significantly more critical words than the control, ADHD-predominantly inattentive (ADHD-IA), and ADHD-predominantly hyperactive-impulsive (ADHD-HI) groups. The ADHD groups recalled and recognized more false positives, were more confident in their false responses, and displayed more knowledge corruption than the controls. The ADHD-CT group recalled and recognized more false positives than the other ADHD groups.

CONCLUSION

The adults with ADHD have more false memories than the controls and that false memory formation varied with the ADHD subtypes.

Factors contributing to social cognition impairment in borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia

Social cognition (SC) deficits have been described both in patients with schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder (BPD). However, while the former tend towards simplistic mental state attributions (undermentalizing), the latter are more likely to make overly complex mental state inferences (overmentalizing). Performance on complex SC tasks has been shown to correlate with neurocognitive ability, emotion perception, a history of trauma, and overconfidence in errors. However, it is unclear how these factors relate to different aspects of SC deficits. Aim of the present study was to examine the pathways of SC impairment by investigating performance profiles and their predictors comparatively in BPD and schizophrenia. Participants were 44 patients with BPD, 36 patients with schizophrenia, and 38 healthy controls. Undermentalizing and overmentalizing were assessed with an ecologically valid SC task. Patients with BPD exhibited increased overmentalizing, whereas patients with schizophrenia showed a more extensive deficit pattern, their main error type being undermentalizing. Overconfidence in errors was the most important predictor for overmentalizing, while undermentalizing depended mainly on verbal memory and emotion perception. Thus, BPD und schizophrenia exhibited different SC impairment patterns, and different types of SC errors were predicted by different factors. These findings have implications for the optimization of treatment approaches.

Borderline personality disorder is associated with lower confidence in perception of emotional body movements

Much recent research has shown that personality disorders are associated with an altered emotion perception. Whereas most of this research was conducted with stimuli such as faces, the present study examined possible differences in the perception of emotions expressed via body language and body movements. 30 patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and 30 non-patients observed video scenes of emotional human interactions conveyed by point–light displays, rated the depicted valence, and judged their confidence in this rating. Patients with BPD showed no altered emotion perception (i.e., no biased perception in either a negative or a positive direction). They did not perceive and evaluate depicted emotions as being more extreme than healthy controls. However, patients with BPD showed less confidence in their perception of depicted emotions, especially when these were difficult to identify. The findings extend insights on altered emotion perception in persons with BPD to include the field of body movements.