How Do Social Interactions Affect Individuals with Avoidant & Borderline Personality Disorders?

This video answers the question: How do social interactions affect individuals with avoidant personality disorder and those with borderline personality disorder? When we look at the research that has information about social interactions, or a construct called social proximity, it's important to remember that a lot of times when we look at avoidant personality disorder, we're looking at information that was gathered from individuals have social anxiety disorder. This is because these two disorders are similar and it's difficult to find participants who have avoidant personality disorder. We know from research on social anxiety disorder that being alone - not being in social proximity - can be problematic. It can result in less positive mood and more negative mood, so really when we look at this question about social interactions and avoidant personality disorder, what's being asked here is: does avoidant personality disorder respond the same way as social anxiety disorder? We know that avoidant personality disorder is characterized by a number of feelings that seem to be related to social situations and relationships including: embarrassment, feeling inept or inferior, and being worried about being criticized or rejected. It wouldn't be surprising that with these types of characteristics and symptoms that social proximity would have some sort of negative effect on individuals with avoidant personality disorder, but we also know that individuals with avoidant personality tend to desire social relationships, so we would expect some positive effects as well. It's important to understand when we talk about social interactions or social proximity that there are a few different ways to measure these constructs. Social proximity can be measured as the frequency of social proximity (person-level), and also the effective quality of being in or out of social proximity, so comparing how someone's mood is when they're around other people (moment-level). We see from research that social proximity has a positive effect for individuals who do not have personality disorder, but it has mixed results for individuals with avoidant or borderline personality disorder. It’s particularly interesting that one of the defining characteristics for each of these disorders (anxiety for avoidant personality disorder and anger for borderline personality disorder) increased when an individual was in social proximity.

Gadassi, R., Snir, A., Berenson, K., Downey, G., & Rafaeli, E. (2014). Out of the frying pan, into the fire: Mixed affective reactions to social proximity in borderline and avoidant personality disorders in daily life. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 123(3), 613-622. doi:10.1037/a0036929

Видео How Do Social Interactions Affect Individuals with Avoidant & Borderline Personality Disorders? канала Dr. Todd Grande