TY - JOUR
T1 - Aberrant link between empathy and social attribution style in borderline personality disorder
AU - Homan, Philipp
AU - Reddan, Marianne C.
AU - Brosch, Tobias
AU - Koenigsberg, Harold W.
AU - Schiller, Daniela
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2017/11
Y1 - 2017/11
N2 - In social interactions, we often need to quickly infer why other people do what they do. More often than not, we infer that behavior is a result of personality rather than circumstances. It is unclear how the tendency itself may contribute to psychopathology and interpersonal dysfunction. Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by severe interpersonal dysfunction. Here, we investigated if this dysfunction is related to the tendency to over-attribute behaviors to personality traits. Healthy controls and patients with BPD judged positive and negative behaviors presented within a situational constraint during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Before the experiment, we measured trait levels of empathy, paranoia, and need for cognition. Behaviorally, we found that empathy levels predicted the tendency to attribute behavior to traits in healthy controls, whereas in patients with BPD this relationship was significantly weakened. Whole brain analysis of group-by-empathy interaction revealed that when participants judged the behavior during the attribution phase, several brain regions implicated in mentalizing distinguished patients from controls: In healthy controls, neural activity scaled negatively with empathy, but this relationship was reversed in BPD patients. Due to the cross-sectional study design we cannot establish a causal link between empathy and social attributions. These findings indicate that the self-reported tendency to feel for others is related to the tendency to integrate situational information beyond personality. In BPD patients, by contrast, the association between empathy and attribution was significantly weaker, rendering empathy less informative in predicting the overall attribution style.
AB - In social interactions, we often need to quickly infer why other people do what they do. More often than not, we infer that behavior is a result of personality rather than circumstances. It is unclear how the tendency itself may contribute to psychopathology and interpersonal dysfunction. Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by severe interpersonal dysfunction. Here, we investigated if this dysfunction is related to the tendency to over-attribute behaviors to personality traits. Healthy controls and patients with BPD judged positive and negative behaviors presented within a situational constraint during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Before the experiment, we measured trait levels of empathy, paranoia, and need for cognition. Behaviorally, we found that empathy levels predicted the tendency to attribute behavior to traits in healthy controls, whereas in patients with BPD this relationship was significantly weakened. Whole brain analysis of group-by-empathy interaction revealed that when participants judged the behavior during the attribution phase, several brain regions implicated in mentalizing distinguished patients from controls: In healthy controls, neural activity scaled negatively with empathy, but this relationship was reversed in BPD patients. Due to the cross-sectional study design we cannot establish a causal link between empathy and social attributions. These findings indicate that the self-reported tendency to feel for others is related to the tendency to integrate situational information beyond personality. In BPD patients, by contrast, the association between empathy and attribution was significantly weaker, rendering empathy less informative in predicting the overall attribution style.
KW - Attribution
KW - Borderline personality disorder
KW - Empathy
KW - Mentalizing
KW - Social cognition
KW - Temporoparietal junction
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2017.07.012
DO - 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2017.07.012
M3 - Article
C2 - 28735169
AN - SCOPUS:85024837176
SN - 0022-3956
VL - 94
SP - 163
EP - 171
JO - Journal of Psychiatric Research
JF - Journal of Psychiatric Research
ER -