About This Project

Knowing who to trust really matters. Otherwise, you risk being gullible, paranoid, unfriendly, or lonely. For people with BPD, these social difficulties often persist after other symptoms improve. This project will test how trust learning changes as people recover from BPD. The data we collect here will help us understand recovery, and let us plan future studies to test how treatment and brain changes can promote social recovery.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

People with mental illness often experience remission (symptoms decreasing below the number you need to be diagnosed) but not recovery (getting back to a meaningful life). We think that better understanding of how people make calculations about what to do in social interactions is critical to helping people fully recover. Revealing differences in social behavior between people who do and do not recover will identify key targets for treatment.

What is the significance of this project?

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a common mental illness that affects 1/20 people. People with BPD who don't recover are at significantly increased risk of suicide. We are currently not good at knowing who will go on to recover and who will not. Focused experiments are urgently needed to identify barriers to recovery. Successful social interactions are at the heart of recovery. We are already using quantitative tools to measure detailed aspects of social interactions -- we now need to define differences between those who recover and those who do not.

What are the goals of the project?

We will enroll 100 people with BPD, half of whom have recovered 5+ years after their first mental health contact, and half who have not.

We will test differences between the 2 groups in specific aspects of social behavior in an interaction, such as initial trust, initial cooperation, willingness to coax a partner to cooperate, and changes in behavior after betrayal.

We will then use these results to hone plans for experiments that will identify the most relevant brain networks that contribute to recovery.