How do women with BPD and schizophrenia read other people?
While women with schizophrenia struggle with overall social reasoning, women with borderline personality disorder generally understand others well but tend to over-interpret people's intentions.
Source
Theory of mind in women with borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia: differences in overall ability and error patterns
What they did
The researchers compared social reasoning abilities in groups of female participants: 25 with borderline personality disorder, 25 with schizophrenia, and 25 healthy controls. All participants watched a 15-minute video of a social dinner party, which paused 45 times to ask multiple-choice questions about the characters' thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Based on their wrong answers, participants were scored on different error patterns: over-interpreting social cues, under-interpreting cues, or failing to identify any social meaning at all.
What they found
Women with schizophrenia showed severe overall impairments in social reasoning, performing nearly two standard deviations below the healthy controls and making more errors of all types. In contrast, women with borderline personality disorder had normal overall scores but showed a specific tendency to over-interpret social cues, attributing excessive meaning or hostile intentions to others. This tendency to over-interpret was just as strong in women with borderline personality disorder as it was in women with schizophrenia.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Additionally, because the sample only included female participants, the results cannot be automatically generalized to men with borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia. Furthermore, the study's correlational nature means we cannot prove whether trauma, symptoms, or emotional dysregulation directly cause these differing social reasoning styles. Lastly, the study evaluated participants in a calm, non-interactive lab setting, meaning it does not capture how their social reasoning might break down during highly stressful, real-life interpersonal conflicts.
Key terms
- Theory of Mind
- The cognitive capacity to attribute mental states—such as beliefs, intents, desires, emotions, and knowledge—to oneself and to others.
- Overmentalizing
- The tendency to make excessive or overly complex assumptions about other people's mental states, reading too much hidden meaning or intention into simple social cues.
- Reduced Theory of Mind
- A type of social reasoning error where a person tries to infer someone else's mental state but does so with insufficient or incomplete information.
- No Theory of Mind
- A complete failure to consider or grasp mental states when interpreting social situations, treating people's actions as purely physical or non-intentional.
- Borderline Personality Disorder
- A mental health condition characterized by severe instability in relationships, self-image, emotions, and impulsive behavior.
- Schizophrenia
- A severe mental disorder characterized by disruptions in thought processes, perceptions, emotional responsiveness, and social interactions.
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Quiz yourself
In schizophrenia research, what are the four core domains of social cognition?
Common questions
Why did the researchers only study women?
Borderline personality disorder is diagnosed more frequently in women, and the clinic where recruitment occurred had very few male patients. To keep the comparison groups balanced and avoid gender-based statistical noise, the researchers chose to focus entirely on female participants.
What is the difference between overmentalizing and simply being bad at reading people?
Being bad at reading people often means missing cues entirely (undermentalizing). Overmentalizing means you are actively paying close attention to social cues, but you project too much complex, often negative, intention onto them, like assuming someone's quietness means they are secretly plotting against you.
How does trauma relate to the overmentalizing style found in BPD?
The researchers suggest that a history of childhood trauma or abuse, which is common in BPD, makes individuals hypervigilant to threats. This hypervigilance can cause them to continually over-analyze and suspect bad intentions in others as a self-protective mechanism.
How does the test used in this study differ from older social cognition tests?
Older tests often used simple, static photos of eyes or short text descriptions, which do not mimic real life. This study used a dynamic 15-minute video of a social dinner, making it a much more realistic, ecologically valid measure of real-time social reasoning.
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