title: What we have changed our minds about: Part 2. Borderline personality disorder, epistemic trust and the developmental significance of social communication.
abstract: In Part 1 of this paper, we discussed emerging evidence suggesting that a general psychopathology or 'p' factor underlying the various forms of psychopathology should be conceptualized in terms of the absence of resilience, that is, the absence of positive reappraisal mechanisms when faced with adversity. These impairments in the capacity for positive reappraisal seem to provide a comprehensive explanation for the association between the p factor and comorbidity, future caseness, and the 'hard-to-reach' character of many patients with severe personality pathology, most notably borderline personality disorder (BPD). In this, the second part of the paper, we trace the development of the absence of resilience to disruptions in the emergence of human social communication, based on recent evolutionary and developmental psychopathology accounts. We argue that BPD and related disorders may be reconceptualized as a form of social understanding in which epistemic hypervigilance, distrust or outright epistemic freezing is an adaptive consequence of the social learning environment. Negative appraisal mechanisms become overriding, particularly in situations of attachment stress. This constitutes a shift towards a more socially oriented perspective on personality psychopathology in which the absence of psychological resilience is seen as a learned response to the transmission of social knowledge. This shift in our views has also forced us to reconsider the role of attachment in BPD. The implications for prevention and intervention of this novel approach are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, London, UK.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-0229-0091
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Fonagy
authors.affiliation: Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, London, UK.|Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
authors.forename: Patrick
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Luyten
authors.affiliation: Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, London, UK.
authors.forename: Elizabeth
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Allison
authors.affiliation: Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, London, UK.
authors.forename: Chloe
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Campbell
keywords: Attachment; Borderline personality disorder; Epistemic trust; Mentalizing; Psychopathology; Resilience