Mentalizing Mediates the Association Between Childhood Maltreatment and Adolescent Borderline and Narcissistic Personality Traits
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Childhood maltreatment is theorized to undermine the development of mentalizing and to disrupt the consolidation of healthy narcissism and the integration of personality at the level of affect and interpersonal regulation. Consistent with this, mentalizing can be expected to mediate the relationship between childhood maltreatment and vulnerable and grandiose narcissism as well as borderline personality traits, but this has not been examined in adolescents. Objective: The aim of this study was to examine associations between childhood maltreatment and adolescent personality disorder traits and test the mediating role of mentalizing in a sample of 263 adolescents and young adults aged 12 to 21. Methods: Participants recruited from schools and a tertiary institution completed the Childhood Experiences of Care and Abuse Questionnaire (CECA-Q), the Borderline Personality Features Scale for Children (BPFS-C), the Pathological Narcissism Inventory (PNI) and the Reflective Function Questionnaire for Youth (RFQ-Y). Results: Adolescents with histories of sexual and physical abuse reported significantly more borderline personality features, as well as vulnerable and grandiose narcissism. They also reported signficantly more mentalizing difficulties including confusion regarding mental states and excessive certainty regarding mental states of others. Confusion regarding mental states partially mediated the relation between emotional abuse and borderline personality traits, as well as vulnerable and grandiose narcissism. Excessive certainty regarding the mental states of others mediated the relationship between childhood experiences of role reversal and grandiose narcissism. Conclusion: The findings are consistent with a mentalization model of adolescent personality difficulties and show that the relation between childhood maltreatment and personality disorder traits in adolescents may be in part understood in terms of the impact of such experiences on different dimensions of mentalizing. Keywords: Mentalizing, adolescents, maltreatment, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".