title: Investigating the personality disorder psychotherapy process: the roles of symptoms, quality of affects, emotional dysregulation, interpersonal processes, and mentalizing.
abstract: Personality Disorders (PDs) can reasonably hope to gain benefit from psychotherapy. Nevertheless many patients do not fully respond. Research therefore has to be done into which variables need to be targeted in psychotherapy, in order to tailor treatment to the needs of the majority of PD patients. These have to date been understudied, in particular where patients have PD other than borderline and where they obtain no or limited benefits from available treatments. Many elements of the therapy process, such as therapy alliance, can be investigated. We outline here some personality pathology core issues and then describe how the authors involved in this special issue investigated the roles of symptoms, emotional experience and regulation, interpersonal patterns and mentalizing in PD psychotherapy.
authors.affiliation: a Centro Di Terapia Metacognitiva Interpersonale , Rome , Italy.
authors.forename: Giancarlo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Dimaggio
authors.forename: Giuseppe
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Nicolò
authors.forename: Antonio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Semerari
authors.forename: Antonino
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Carcione
mesh_terms: D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D010554:Personality Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy*; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D011613:Psychotherapy / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D056345:Theory of Mind / Q000502:physiology