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The precise nature and etiopathogenesis of borderline personality disorder (BPD) continues to elude researchers and clinicians. Yet, increasing evidence from various strands of research converges to suggest that affect dysregulation, impulsivity, and unstable relationships constitute the core features of BPD. Over the last two decades, the mentalizationbased approach to BPD has attempted to provide a theoretically consistent way of conceptualizing the interrelationship between these core features of BPD, with the aim of providing clinicians with a conceptually sound and empirically supported approach to BPD and its treatment. This paper presents an extended version of this approach to BPD based on recently accumulated data. In particular, we suggest that the core features of BPD reflect impairments in different facets of mentalization, each related to impairments in relatively distinct neural circuits underlying these facets. Hence, we provide a comprehensive account of BPD by showing how its core features are related to each other in theoretically meaningful ways. More specifically, we argue that BPD is primarily associated with a low threshold for the activation of the attachment system and deactivation of controlled mentalization, linked to impairments in the ability to differentiate mental states of self and other, which lead to hypersensitivity and increased susceptibility to contagion by other people's mental states, and poor integration of cognitive and affective aspects of mentalization. The combination of these impairments may explain BPD patients' propensity for vicious interpersonal cycles, and their high levels of affect dysregulation and impulsivity. Finally, the implications of this expanded mentalization-based approach to BPD for mentalization-based treatment and treatment of BPD more generally are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between self-esteem in adolescence and later mental health, substance use, and life and relationship outcomes in adulthood. The investigation analyzed data from a birth cohort of approximately 1,000 New Zealand young adults studied to the age of 25. Lower levels of self-esteem at age 15 were associated with greater risks of mental health problems, substance dependence, and lower levels of life and relationship satisfaction at ages 18, 21, and 25. Adjustment for potentially confounding factors reduced the strength of these associations to either moderate or statistically nonsignificant levels. It was concluded that the effects of self-esteem during adolescence on later developmental outcomes were weak, and largely explained by the psychosocial context within which self-esteem develops. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Maltreatment during childhood is associated with difficult interpersonal relationships throughout the life course. The aim of the current study was to investigate differential pathways from child maltreatment to emerging adult relationship dysfunction. Specifically, we prospectively tested whether child maltreatment initiates a developmental cascade resulting in coercive negative romantic and friend interactions in emerging adulthood via childhood antisocial tendencies and via childhood relational aggression. Utilizing a longitudinal sample of emerging adult participants (N = 392; mean age = 20 years old) who took part in a summer research camp program as children (mean age = 11 years old), results supported pathways via both childhood antisocial behavior and childhood relational aggression. We found specificity within these pathways such that childhood antisocial behavior was a mediator of child maltreatment effects on emerging adult negative romantic interactions, whereas childhood relational aggression was a mediator of child maltreatment effects on emerging adult negative friend interactions. Taken together, results indicate that children exposed to maltreatment face significant interpersonal challenges in emerging adulthood, within both the friend and the romantic domains, and point to distinct childhood pathways to these negative interactions. Our findings are consistent with Dishion's (2016) theoretical framework for understanding the development of coercion in relationships and highlight the criticality of early intervention with maltreating families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe and complex disorder characterized by instability across many life domains, including interpersonal relations, behavior, and emotions. A core feature and contributor to BPD, emotion dysegulation (ED), consists of deficits in the ability to regulate emotions in a manner that allows the individual to pursue important goals or behave effectively in various contexts. Biosocial developmental models of BPD have emphasized a transaction of environmental conditions (e.g., invalidating environments and adverse childhood experiences) with key genetically linked vulnerabilities (e.g., impulsivity and emotional vulnerability) in the development of ED and BPD. Emerging evidence has begun to highlight the complex, heterotypic pathways to the development of BPD, with key heritable vulnerability factors possibly interacting with aspects of the rearing environment to produce worsening ED and an adolescent trajectory consisting of self-damaging behaviors and eventual BPD. Adults with BPD have shown evidence of a variety of cognitive, physiological, and behavioral characteristics of ED. As the precursors to the development of ED and BPD have become clearer, prevention and treatment efforts hold great promise for reducing the long-term suffering, functional impairment, and considerable societal costs associated with BPD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early caregiving adversity is associated with increased risk for social difficulties. The ventral striatum and associated corticostriatal circuitry, which have demonstrated vulnerability to early exposures to adversity, are implicated in many aspects of social behavior, including social play, aggression, and valuation of social stimuli across development. Here, we used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the degree to which early caregiving adversity was associated with altered coritocostriatal resting connectivity in previously institutionalized youth (n = 41) relative to youth who were raised with their biological families from birth (n = 47), and the degree to which this connectivity was associated with parent-reported social problems. Using a seed-based approach, we observed increased positive coupling between the ventral striatum and anterior regions of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in previously institutionalized youth. Stronger ventral striatum-mPFC coupling was associated with parent reports of social problems. A moderated-mediation analysis showed that ventral striatal-mPFC connectivity mediated group differences in social problems, and more so with increasing age. These findings show that early institutional care is associated with differences in resting-state connectivity between the ventral striatum and the mPFC, and this connectivity seems to play an increasingly important role in social behaviors as youth enter adolescence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Goal-Corrected Partnership Adolescent Coding System (GPACS) has shown promise in assessing a secure as well as three atypical patterns of parent–adolescent interaction during a conflict discussion. The current study of 186 economically disadvantaged families examines the degree to which four GPACS patterns: secure/collaborative, hostile/punitive, role confused, and disoriented, prospectively predict adolescents’ social competence and maladaptive behavior (internalizing, externalizing, and risk behaviors) at age 15 years after controlling for these social behaviors at age 13 years and contemporaneous GPACS scores. Adolescents from secure/collaborative dyads at age 13 were more likely to have a secure state of mind in the Adult Attachment Interview at age 15 and showed higher levels of teachers’ ratings of empathy and lower levels of teachers’ ratings of externalizing behaviors at age 15 years. Adolescents in disoriented dyads showed higher levels of teacher-rated internalizing problems, while male adolescents in role confused dyads reported higher levels of involvement in risk behaviors, including unprotected sexual activity and substance use problems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Childhood depressive symptoms may arise from genetic and environmental risks, which act to bias the ways in which children process emotional information. Previous studies show that several “cognitive biases” are heritable and share genetic and environmental risks with depressive symptoms. Past research suggests that many cognitive biases only reflect genetic risks for depressive symptoms from adolescence. The present study sought to identify (a) when interpersonal cognitions mature as risk factors for depressive symptoms by examining whether these factors are stable and predict symptoms across time in childhood, and (b) the extent to which interpersonal cognitions reflect inherited/environmental risks on children's depressive symptoms. Results showed that there was some stability for interpersonal cognitive biases from age 8 to 10 years (rs = .32–.43). Only the absence of positive self/other perceptions, and negative peer and mother expectations at age 8 predicted depressive symptoms at age 10 (after controlling for depressive symptoms at age 8). The absence of positive self/other perceptions shared genetic influences with depressive symptoms within and across time. Across middle to late childhood, interpersonal cognitions begin to operate as vulnerability-trait factors for depressive symptoms, gradually reflecting distal genetic risks on symptoms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A fundamental question in the discipline of developmental psychopathology is whether early interpersonal experiences influence maladaptation in enduring or transient ways. We address this issue by applying a structural modeling approach developed by us to examine data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development on maternal sensitivity in the first 3 years of life and its association with symptoms of psychopathology through age 15. Results suggest that there may be enduring effects of early caregiving experiences on symptomatology as rated by teachers, although such effects were not found for maternal report. Additional analyses indicated that enduring associations found via teacher report could not be fully accounted for by continuity in caregiving experiences or by early contextual adversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing evidence supports the biological sensitivity to context theory, which posits that physiologically reactive children, as indexed by autonomic nervous system (ANS) reactivity to laboratory stressors, are more susceptible to both negative and positive environmental influences than their low reactive peers. High biological sensitivity is a risk factor for behavioral and health problems in the context of high adversity, whereas in contexts of low adversity it has been found to promote positive adaptation. However, several studies have shown the opposite effect, finding that children who exhibited high ANS reactivity in response to interpersonal stressors were buffered from the deleterious effects of marital conflict, whereas children who showed low ANS reactivity were more vulnerable to high levels of marital conflict. Using an ethnically diverse sample of 260 kindergartners (130 girls, 130 boys), the current study investigated whether the interaction effect of marital conflict and the two branches of ANS reactivity on children's externalizing and internalizing symptoms differs with the nature of the laboratory challenge task used to measure children's stress response. As hypothesized, results indicate that the interaction between ANS reactivity and marital conflict significantly predicted children's behavior problems, but the direction of the effect varied with the nature of the challenge task (i.e., interpersonal or cognitive). This study illustrates the importance of considering the effect of laboratory stimuli when assessing whether children's ANS reactivity moderates the effects of adversity exposure on adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age at menarche, a sentinel index of pubertal maturation, was examined in relation to early family relationships (conflict, cohesion) and polymorphic variation in the gene encoding estrogen receptor-α (ESR1) in a midlife sample of 455 European American women. Consistent with prior literature, women who reported being raised in families characterized by close interpersonal relationships and little conflict tended to reach menarche at a later age than participants reared in families lacking cohesion and prone to discord. Moreover, this association was moderated by ESR1 variation, such that quality of the family environment covaried positively with menarcheal age among participants homozygous for minor alleles of the two ESR1 polymorphisms studied here (rs9304799, rs2234693), but not among women of other ESR1 genotypes. In addition, (a) family relationship variables were unrelated to ESR1 variation, and (b) genotype-dependent effects of childhood environment on age at menarche could not be accounted for by personality traits elsewhere shown to explain heritable variation in reported family conflict and cohesion. These findings are consistent with theories of differential susceptibility to environmental influence, as well as the more specific hypothesis (by Belsky) that girls differ genetically in their sensitivity to rearing effects on pubertal maturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A three-wave cascade model linking life stress to increases in risk behavior was tested with 347 African American emerging adults living in the rural South. Data analyses using structural equation modeling and latent growth curve modeling demonstrated that life stress was linked to increases in risk behavior as African Americans transitioned out of secondary school. The cascade model indicated that life stress fostered increases in negative emotions. Negative emotions, in turn, were linked to increases in affiliations with deviant peers and romantic partners; this forecast increases in risk behavior. The findings supported a stress proliferation framework, in which primary stressors affect increases in secondary stressors that carry forward to influence changes in risk behaviors that can potentially compromise mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This multiwave longitudinal study investigated potential transactional and accumulating influences among corumination, interpersonal stressors, and internalizing symptoms among a sample of early and middle adolescents (N = 350; 6th-10th graders). Youth completed self-report measures of corumination at Times 1, 2, and 4, and negative life events, internalizing symptoms (general depressive, specific anhedonic depressive, anxious arousal, general internalizing), and externalizing problems at all four time points (5 weeks between each assessment across 4 months). Results supported hypotheses. First, baseline corumination predicted prospective trajectories of all forms of internalizing symptoms but not externalizing problems. Second, baseline corumination predicted generation of interpersonal-dependent, but not interpersonal-independent or noninterpersonal stressors. Third, interpersonal-dependent events partially mediated the longitudinal association between baseline corumination and prospective internalizing symptoms. Fourth, a transactional, bidirectional set of associations was supported in that initial internalizing symptoms and stressors predicted later elevations in corumination, and in turn, corumination predicted later symptoms through the mediating role of interpersonal stressors to complete both streams in the transactional chain of influence. Fifth, girls and older adolescents exhibited higher corumination, but neither age nor sex moderated any associations. These findings are discussed within a transactional, developmental cascade model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioral inhibition is reported to be one of the most stable temperamental characteristics in childhood. However, there is also evidence for discontinuity of this trait, with infants and toddlers who were extremely inhibited displaying less withdrawn social behavior as school-age children or adolescents. There are many possible explanations for the discontinuity in this temperament over time. They include the development of adaptive attention and regulatory skills, the influence of particular styles of parenting or caregiving contexts, and individual characteristics of the child such as their level of approach–withdrawal motivation or their gender. These discontinuous trajectories of behaviorally inhibited children and the factors that form them are discussed as examples of the resilience process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ninety-four low- and middle-income preschoolers (48 boys, 46 girls) were recruited from two sites in a large southwestern city. Children's positive attributions of peer intent, social problem-solving decisions, and attributions of peers' feelings about the provocation were evaluated from individual interviews. In addition, children's anger perception accuracy and their global emotion situation knowledge were assessed. Teachers and their assistants reported on the children's social competence, internalizing and externalizing behavior, and the degree to which children were physically and relationally victimized. Social competence was a negative predictor of relational and physical victimization, and externalizing behavior was a positive predictor of both types of victimization. Anger perception accuracy was negatively related to physical victimization, and global emotion situation knowledge and attributions of sorrow to provoking peers were positive predictors. Results support a conceptual framework that emphasizes the importance of social and emotion-related social cognitive variables for understanding young children's peer-related victimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigated the developmental stages (pubertal status) and contexts (early or late timing relative to peers, and a context of stressful versus supportive peer relationships) in which the sex difference in depression unfolds. A sample of 158 youth (ages 9.6-14.8) and their caregivers provided information at two waves, 1 year apart, on puberty, peer stress, and depression. Pubertal status and timing (actual and perceived) interacted with sex to predict depression. Sex differences in depression were evident at particular levels of pubertal status and timing, both actual and perceived. Depression was associated with more mature pubertal status and early timing (both actual and perceived) in girls, but with less mature pubertal status and late timing (actual and perceived) in boys. These patterns held concurrently, and often over time, particularly in a context of stressful peer relationships (peer stress moderated sex-differentiated associations between puberty and depression). Of note, there were no significant sex differences in depression at any particular age. Thus, this research highlights important distinctions among the contributions of age, pubertal status, pubertal timing, and perceived timing to the sex difference in adolescent depression. More broadly, these findings contribute to our growing understanding of the interactions among physical, social, and psychological processes involved in the sex difference in adolescent depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using longitudinal data and structural modeling, we investigated bidirectional associations among preadolescents' peer relationships, peer-relevant cognition, and depressive symptoms. Depression was expected to be an outcome and precursor of peer-relevant cognition, and cognition was expected to be an outcome and precursor of being more or less liked by classmates (peer likeability). We also examined whether cognition mediated the association between peer likeability and depression. Participants were 308 students (mean age = 11.0, SD = 0.9) who participated twice during a school year. A third assessment was completed with Grade 5 to 6 students 1 year after the second assessment. The model with bidirectional paths had a good fit to the data, but the most parsimonious model was an "effects" model showing that preadolescents with more depressive symptoms had less positive peer-relevant cognition at later assessments, and that those with more positive peer-relevant cognition were more liked by their peers over time. There were no age differences, some gender differences, and no support for cognition as a moderator of the association between depression and peer likeability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]