An Unwarranted Hidden Assumption in Research on Personality Disorders

One of the major reasons I became interested in family systems theory, tribalism, family myths, social psychology, and other manifestations of collectivism was because I noticed a big problem with the major forms of psychotherapy practiced on individuals: psychodynamic and cognitive-behavior therapy, and, though to a lesser extent, humanistic therapies like Gestalt therapy.  

All of these forms of individual therapies pay way too much attention to the way patients are reacting, and not nearly enough attention to what it is they are reacting to.

It’s a bit like looking at someone who is falling apart after recently having personally witnessed their entire family being beheaded by terrorists, and concluding that he or she has “poor distress tolerance coping skills.” Well, maybe not quite that bad, but you get the idea.

Some psychologists talk about something called the fundamental attribution error. According to Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross in their 1980 book, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment, this is defined as “the assumption that behavior is caused primarily by the enduring and consistent disposition of the actor, as opposed to the particular characteristics of the situation to which the actor responds.”

Richard E. Nisbett, Ph.D.

Of course, internal predispositions, one's past history of learning due to environmental reinforcement, and free will are very important in determining how people are going to respond to a given situation. With people who have personality disorders in particular, however, to say that their living in a family war zone, as frequently described in this blog, is not a huge part of the problem seems to me to be the height of absurdity.

I thought of this issue recently after reading an article entitled “Ecological Momentary Assessment in Borderline Personality Disorder: A Review of Recent Findings and Methodological Challenges” (Santangelo, Bohus, & Ebner-Priemer, Journal of Personality Disorders 28 (4), pp. 555-576). 

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) is a research technique designed to look at behavior and internal processes outside of the confines of what is called retrospective reporting. Retrospective reporting is the subjects' response to questionnaires about the way they normally respond in their daily lives - in hindsight.

People in studies using this technique are given a diary to fill out several times per day at regular, fixed intervals as they live their normal lives. They are instructed to record certain feelings and reactions they are experiencing. In the article’s abstract, it says that EMA is “characterized by a series of repeated assessments of current affective, behavioral, and contextual experiences or physiological  processes while participants engage in normal daily activities.”

As the authors reviewed the results of prior studies using this methodology in subjects with borderline personality disorder (BPD), one of those hidden assumptions I defined in a previous post just jumped out at me. The authors were inherently ignoring issues created by the fundamental attribution error. 

The definition of EMA in the article's abstract mentions “context,” by which I assume they mean the environmental context, but in the studies and in their discussion about them, the issue of environmental context seemed to be missing in action. The subjects were always asked about how they were responding, but almost never asked about what it was that they were responding to!

The authors’ literature review focused on five of the DSM’s (the official diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association) criteria for BPD: 1. Affective instability. 2. Dissociation and transient paranoid ideation. 3. Interpersonal disturbances. 4. Self esteem disturbances. 5. Suicidality.

Now, one legitimate reason for doing these studies is to check on the validity of the diagnostic criteria for BPD, in which case descriptions about how the subjects’ families were behaving would be somewhat irrelevant. Since the diagnostic criteria were used to establish the diagnosis of BPD before the studies were even done, if the studies seemed to indicate that the criteria are turning out to be invalid, that would have to mean one of two things:

1.       Patients with BPD have been invariably lying through their teeth - on an impossibly consistent basis - in giving even superficial descriptions of their personal symptoms and experiences during diagnostic interviews ever since the syndrome was first recognized, or 
2.      The experimenters in the various earlier studies were lousy diagnosticians and were not applying the criteria in a valid manner.

Now, since I would assume that neither of these things was generally true, a finding that the subjects did not experience these symptoms would be most surprising. Of course, generally the subjects did experience the symptoms, although perhaps in some cases not quite in the generally accepted way. This sort of a conclusion is very close to being a tautology – that is, “a rose is a rose.”

But I digress. The authors clearly mention that some of the symptoms they are looking at occur in response to stress, but generally the subjects are not asked to describe the actual stresses to which they are responding. For instance, they say that subjects with BPD were found to be “more prone” to experience stress than controls. 

The problem with this is that it that assumes that the stressors that the controls are responding to are of equal frequency, severity, and nature as the stressors to which the subjects are responding. But no descriptions of those essential factors are presented. Perhaps if the controls were living in a more stressful environment, they would experience the stresses in a fashion more similar to that of the BPD subjects. 

Why are the subjects not also asked in their diaries to describe the stressors to which they are reacting? Is it all in their heads?  (It’s All in Your Head was the original title of my last book. Damn those academic publishers who thought that title was too colloquial). Or is it because therapists, like a lot of people these days, don’t want to look at what is actually going on in families?

Another issue is that, even if the diaries did ask about stressful interactions with intimates, and even if patients described them honestly and included their own behavior in their descriptions, the experimenters would still be in the dark about how severely stressful they were. That is because these interactions have subtexts, as I described in my post The Obvious Secret of Interpersonal Interactions Within Families. 

Words and behaviors during family interactions take on additional shades of meanings within the context of all prior interactions, and these meanings can significantly add to the stress level of the involved parties. In fact, without knowing the entire history of the patient's family interactions, the experimenter's judgments about the severity of the stress would by necessity be extremely flawed. 

As far as I know, there is only one method by which a mental health professional can obtain this data: long term psychotherapy with the involved individual. This should also include occasional conjoint sessions with the patient and family members, to get their sides of the story. The stressors of every single patient have qualities that are unique to them.

Without any descriptions of the nature of the stressors, we can not really come to valid conclusions. Of course, a possible assumption that should be made is this: people who are under severe stress are undoubtedly more likely to respond with more severe reactions than people who are under far less significant stress. 

Duh!