Saskia Malcorps, Nicole Vliegen and Patrick Luyten (2025) recently conducted a cross-sectional study that looks into the normative development of mentalizing during adolescence. The study included a varied sample of 456 Flemish adolescents (Mage = 15.4 years) and using several self-report/performance-based measures of mentalizing, they oversampled for psychopathology risk status. Specifically, Malcorps et al. (2025) examined how specific mentalizing dimensions are linked to borderline personality disorder (BPD) features. They define mentalizing as the imaginative ability to understand not only yourself, but other individuals too via intentional mental states which is key for social navigation and emotion regulation. Understanding how this develops during adolescence is important since this time is when individuals are especially vulnerable to developing personality pathology.
The findings showed distinct patterns across different dimensions of mentalizing, challenging the assumption that social cognition gets better uniformly as people age. For example, chronological age was not associated with general increases in mentalizing capacity, except in the case of other-focused (externally based affective mentalizing). Facial emotion recognition improved with age, as older adolescents made fewer errors than the younger group. The study also pointed out this nuanced sex-related “female advantage” in social cognition. Girls reported significantly higher levels of other-focused internal, affective, and cognitive mentalizing, demonstrating more empathic concern and perspective taking in comparison to boys. However, there was a trade off because this extra focus also came with higher reported difficulties and uncertainty in self-focused internal, and affective mentalizing. This showed up especially when it came to identifying and describing their own feelings. Even so, there weren’t any sex differences in the objective facial emotion recognition performance.
From a clinical perspective, adolescent BPD features were associated to severe deficits in self focused, internal, affective mentalizing. Dimensionally and categorically, the inability to understand, differentiate, and then verbalize one’s own internal emotional states was the strongest predictor of elevated BPD symptoms. The study also uncovered significant interaction effects, showing that age moderated the relationship between perspective taking and borderline features. Another strong tie to borderline pathology and a higher probability of meeting BPD criteria was poor perspective taking skill in young adolescent girls in comparison with older girls.
These results map out a highly recognizable profile where vulnerable adolescents feel utterly overwhelmed and confused about their own inner emotional world, but they still stay intensely hypersensitive to the feelings and even the facial cues of the people around them. Low emotional clarity mixed with intense emotional sensitivity, can disrupt interpersonal relationships. From these insights, the authors recommend a phased therapeutic plan aimed at early intervention. With this, clinicians are expected to prioritize helping adolescents discover and label their own internal mental states, encouraging self oriented emotional clarity and differentiation. Then, as soon as self-focused mentalizing is stabilized, the therapeutic focus can
move toward building more objective perspective taking skills to help the individual decrease interpersonal dysfunction and navigate complex peer settings more effectively.
By Kaylin Foss
ISSPD Intern
Recent Comments