Other people’s thoughts are an invisible world to us. When trying to understand and predict their behaviour we mostly rely on guesswork. One way of guessing would consist of trying to adopt the other person’s perspective, which is often arduous but also more accurate. Significantly lower abilities to take the other person’s perspective are regularly reported in groups of patients diagnosed with a mental or personality disorder. Yet, these group-level findings often prove to be inconsistent as they lack precision and under-appreciate the group-level heterogeneity of socio-cognitive profiles. Aiming to address these issues in my research, I will present a new way of characterizing patients with alcohol use disorder (N=60) and antisocial personality disorder (N=21) through a perspective-taking paradigm that teases apart self-other priority (i.e., how self-centered or other-centered one is) from self-other distinction performance (i.e., how much one confuses his/her mental states with those of others). Further, I will reveal the multitude of profiles of perspective takers we found across 126 patients. Harnessing the group-level heterogeneity of socio-cognitive profiles through fine-grained and objective measures offers promises for transdiagnostic classifications and interventions.
Bukowski, H., Bigot, A., Leclercq, S., Tiberi, L., Amadieu, C., Peeters, J.-C., Saloppé, X., Nandrino, J.-L., Pham, T., & de Timary, P. (2023). Self-other distinction performance in alcohol use disorder and antisocial personality disorder. North American Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (NASSPD) Conference 2023, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/256222