Mentalization encompasses a set of social cognitive processes critical for adaptation in ever-changing social worlds. Importantly, these skills are sharpened and fine-tuned during adolescence, a period where vulnerability to psychopathology emerges. In this symposium, fours speakers will present data suggesting that impairments in mentalization during adolescence critically contributes to the expression of psychopathology.
In the first presentation, Bales and collaborators present how clinical experience and research performed in mentalization-based programs in the Netherlands has lead to the formulation of a clinical staging model of borderline personality disorder. Importantly, a range of clinical, mentalization-focused interventions adapted at different stages are highlighted in the presentation
In the second presentation, Ballespí and collaborators present data from a Spanish study on more than four hundred adolescents and their parents. Their results suggest that impairments in mentalizing incur proneness to general psychopathology. Importantly, the author further present their results linking youths’ clinical profiles and parents’ capacity to mentalize.
In the third presentation, Morosan and collaborators investigate self-other and affective-cognitive mentalizing dimensions in a group of incarcerated adolescence in Switzerland. The study provides important insights into the relationships between different dimensions of mentalizing during adolescents in the development of severe externalizing problems.
Finally, in the last presentation, Derome and collaborators experimentally investigates the relationship between proneness to depersonalisation and personality traits (borderline, schizotypal) in Swiss adolescence. They further examine the link between the brain’s functional connectivity, during rest, and general psychopathology as well as mentalizing capacity. This study presents an innovative approach to combine neuroimaging, experimental and clinical levels of investigations.