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Dysfunctional personality traits in adolescence: effects on alerting, orienting and executive control of attention

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Abstract

The present study examined attentional networks performance in 39 adolescents with dysfunctional personality traits, split into two group, Group < 10 and Group ≥ 10, according to the number of criteria they met at the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis II Personality Disorders. The attentional performance has been tested by means of a modified version of the Attentional Network Test (ANTI-V) which allows testing both phasic and tonic components of the alerting system, the exogenous aspect of the orienting system, the executive network and their interactions. Results showed that the orienting costs of having an invalid spatial cue were reduced in the Group ≥ 10 criteria compared to the Group < 10. Moreover, adolescents included in the Group ≥ 10 showed lower conflict when attention was cued to the target location (valid trials) but showed normal interference when there was no overpowering focus of attention (invalid trials). The results found with ANOVA after splitting the sample into two categorical groups were also observed in a complementary correlation analysis keeping intact the continuous nature of such variables. These findings are consistent with the notion that dysfunctional features of personality disorders may represent the psychological manifestations of a neuropsychological abnormality in attention and executive functioning. Finally, we discuss the implications of this attentional anomaly for dysfunctional personality traits and behaviour.

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Notes

  1. The ANT has been developed to obtain an individual index of the three attentional networks (alerting, orienting, and executive control). However, alerting network measures have been usually inferred using only a phasic alertness task. The ANTI-V is useful to achieve also a direct measure of vigilance in addition to the usual ANT scores.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all the participants who took part in this study. Dr. Marotta acknowledges Ministry of Education and Science for a “Juan de la Cierva” research contract.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, “Sapienza” University of Rome, Via dei Marsi, 78, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Maria Casagrande, Andrea Marotta, Valeria Canepone & Alfredo Spagna

  2. Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Neuroscience, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, via Montpellier 1, 00133, Rome, Italy

    Caterina Rosa & Augusto Pasini

  3. Centro di Terapia Metacognitiva Interpersonale, Rome, Italy

    Giancarlo Dimaggio

  4. Department of Experimental Psychology and Physiology of Behaviour, Mind, Brain, and Behaviour Research Center, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Andrea Marotta

Authors
  1. Maria Casagrande
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  2. Andrea Marotta
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  4. Alfredo Spagna
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Correspondence to Maria Casagrande.

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Handling Editor: Rubi Hammer (#University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign); Reviewers: Michael Tennekoon (NIDA, Baltimore), Javier Roca (University of Valencia).

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Casagrande, M., Marotta, A., Canepone, V. et al. Dysfunctional personality traits in adolescence: effects on alerting, orienting and executive control of attention. Cogn Process 18, 183–193 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-017-0797-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-017-0797-6

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