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. 2019 Apr 10:6:5.
doi: 10.1186/s40479-019-0104-5. eCollection 2019.

Hypermentalizing as a marker of borderline personality disorder in Italian adolescents: a cross-cultural replication of Sharp and colleagues' (2011) findings

Antonella Somma  1 , Mauro Ferrara  2 , Arianna Terrinoni  2 , Claudia Frau  2 , Ignazio Ardizzone  2 , Carla Sharp  3 , Andrea Fossati  1
Affiliations

Hypermentalizing as a marker of borderline personality disorder in Italian adolescents: a cross-cultural replication of Sharp and colleagues' (2011) findings

Antonella Somma et al. Borderline Personal Disord Emot Dysregul. .

Abstract

Background: Extant literature indicates that Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) may be reliably assessed in adolescence. Sharp and colleagues' (2011) suggested that mentalization could be an important early target for intervention in BPD adolescents and showed that hypermentalizing may represent an important marker to distinguish emerging BPD from adolescent turmoil. We aimed at testing if both dimensionally-assessed and categorically-diagnosed BPD was selectively associated with hypermentalizing errors on the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC) task in Italian adolescent inpatients and community adolescents.

Findings: The sample was composed of 58 Italian adolescents who were consecutively admitted to an adolescent psychiatry unit in Rome, Italy. BPD was assessed using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-5 Personality Disorders (SCID-5-PD); the MASC task was used to assess mentalizing. Findings supported the hypothesis of a specific link between BPD features and hypermentalizing in adolescent inpatients. Both dimensionally-assessed and categorically-assessed BPD showed significant and non-negligible associations with hypermentalizing. The overall performance on the MASC task significantly discriminated BPD adolescents from Italian community-dwelling adolescents.

Conclusions: Our findings supported the hypothesis that specific deficits in mentalization-namely, hypermentalizing-may play a crucial role in the developmental pathway leading to emerging BPD in adolescence.

Keywords: Adolescence; Borderline personality disorder; Inpatients; Mentalization; Movie for the assessment of social cognition.

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Conflict of interest statement

The study was conducted in accordance with the Italian Psychology Association Ethical Guidelines. “Sapienza” University of Rome Institutional Review Board approved the data collection process, in which consent was obtained from the participants, parents/legal guardian, and assent was obtained from the adolescent participants, and approved also the current study data analysis.Not applicable.The authors declare that they have no competing interests.Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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