چکیده (انگلیسی):

Impaired social cognition has been claimed to be a mechanism underlying the
development and maintenance of borderline personality disorder (BPD). One important
aspect of social cognition is the theory of mind (ToM), a complex skill that seems to be
influenced by more basic processes, such as executive functions (EF) and emotion
recognition. Previous ToM studies in BPD have yielded inconsistent results. This study
assessed the performance of BPD adults on ToM, emotion recognition, and EF tasks. We
also examined whether EF and emotion recognition could predict the performance on
ToM tasks. We evaluated 15 adults with BPD and 15 matched healthy controls using
different tasks of EF, emotion recognition, and ToM. The results showed that BPD adults
exhibited deficits in the three domains, which seem to be task-dependent. Furthermore,
we found that EF and emotion recognition predicted the performance on ToM. Our
results suggest that tasks that involve real-life social scenarios and contextual cues are
more sensitive to detect ToM and emotion recognition deficits in BPD individuals. Our
findings also indicate that (a) ToM variability in BPD is partially explained by individual
differences on EF and emotion recognition; and (b) ToM deficits of BPD patients are
partially explained by the capacity to integrate cues from face, prosody, gesture, and
social context to identify the emotions and others’ beliefs