Self-Regulatory Dysfunctions in Personality Disorders: The Role of Poor Self-Monitoring and Mindreading

To understand how persons self-regulate, we need, as Cervone, Shadel, Smith, and Fiori (2006) assert, to refer to personality science, with which it is possible to identify the multifarious psychological elements and processes helping or hindering action programming, overcoming difficulties, and error correction. Personality disorder research and personality science itself demonstrate that dysfunctions in two skills—self-monitoring and mindreading—worsen selfregulation and lead individuals to fail chronically to achieve goals in the social domain. Here we describe how poor self-reflection and biased mindreading impair self-regulation in personality disorders and other clinical conditions and make some suggestions about how to tackle them in psychotherapy.