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Background: Recent findings suggest that brief dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) for borderline personality disorder is effective for reducing self-harm, but it remains unknown which patients are likely to improve in brief v. 12 months of DBT. Research is needed to identify patient characteristics that moderate outcomes. Here, we characterized changes in cognition across brief DBT (DBT-6) v. a standard 12-month course (DBT-12) and examined whether cognition predicted self-harm outcomes in each arm. Methods: In this secondary analysis of 240 participants in the FASTER study (NCT02387736), cognitive measures were administered at pre-treatment, after 6 months, and at 12 months. Self-harm was assessed from pre-treatment to 2-year follow-up. Multilevel models characterized changes in cognition across treatment. Generalized estimating equations examined whether pre-treatment cognitive performance predicted self-harm outcomes in each arm. Results: Cognitive performance improved in both arms after 6 months of treatment, with no between-arm differences at 12-months. Pre-treatment inhibitory control was associated with different self-harm outcomes in DBT-6 v. DBT-12. For participants with average inhibitory control, self-harm outcomes were significantly better when assigned to DBT-12, relative to DBT-6, at 9–18 months after initiating treatment. In contrast, participants with poor inhibitory control showed better self-harm outcomes when assigned to brief DBT-6 v. DBT-12, at 12–24 months after initiating treatment. Conclusions: This work represents an initial step toward an improved understanding of patient profiles that are best suited to briefer v. standard 12 months of DBT, but observed effects should be replicated in a waitlist-controlled study to confirm that they were treatment-specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Recently proposed alternative dimensional models of personality disorder (PD) place the severity of impairments in self and interpersonal functioning at the core of personality pathology. However, associations of these impairments with disturbances in social, cognitive, and affective brain networks remain uninvestigated., Methods: The present study examined patterns of resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) in a sample of 74 age- and sex-matched participants (45 inpatients with PD and 29 healthy controls). At a minimum, PD patients carried a diagnosis of borderline PD, although the majority of the sample had one or more additional PDs. rsFC patterns in the following networks were compared between groups and in association with dimensional personality impairments: default mode network (DMN)/core mentalization, frontolimbic, salience, and central executive. Further, the extent to which variation in rsFC was explained by levels of personality impairment as compared to typology-specific borderline PD symptom severity was explored., Results: Relative to controls, the PD group showed disruptions in rsFC within the DMN/core mentalization and frontolimbic networks. Among PD patients, greater severity of dimensional self-interpersonal impairment was associated with stronger intralimbic rsFC. In contrast, severity of borderline PD-specific typology was not associated with any rsFC patterns., Conclusions: Disruptions in core mentalization and affective networks are present in PD. Higher intralimbic functional connectivity may underlie self-interpersonal personality impairment in PD regardless of diagnostic typology-specific PD symptoms, providing initial neurobiological evidence supporting alternative dimensional conceptualizations of personality pathology.