Mindfulness for personality disorders.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Third-wave cognitive-behaviour therapies such as dialectical behaviour therapy have demonstrated effectiveness in the treatment of personality disorders, which are considered difficult to treat. These therapies typically incorporate some component of mindfulness practice. The current study examines current applications and effectiveness of mindfulness to the treatment of personality disorders. RECENT FINDINGS: The majority of evidence available focuses on borderline personality disorder, and highlights positive associations between mindfulness practice and reduced psychiatric and clinical symptoms, less emotional reactivity, and less impulsivity. Fewer studies examine the other personality disorders, though emerging case studies have applied mindfulness techniques to treatment with antisocial, avoidant, paranoid, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorders. SUMMARY: Mindfulness is a promising clinical tool for the treatment of personality disorders, and appears to be adaptable to the unique features of different types of personality disorders. However, further empirical research with greater methodological rigour is required to clarify the effectiveness of mindfulness as a specific skill component, and to identify the underlying mechanisms that contribute to therapeutic change.

Improving clinical outcomes in psychiatric care with touch-screen technology.

Patient-focused research, which uses clinical characteristics to predict outcomes, is a field in which information technology has been effectively integrated with practice. The present research used touch-screen technology to monitor the daily self-report measures of 1,308 consecutive inpatients and day patients participating in a 2-week cognitive-behavioral therapy group. Providing regular feedback was effective in reducing symptoms for patients at risk of poor outcomes (Newnham, Hooke, & Page, 2010b). The use of touch screens in psychiatric monitoring encourages a collaborative dialogue between patients and therapists and promotes engagement in the process of progress monitoring and treatment evaluation.

Support for a link between the local processing bias and social deficits in autism: an investigation of embedded figures test performance in non-clinical individuals.

The aim of this investigation was to explore the degree to which specific subsets of autistic-like traits relate to performance on the Embedded Figures Test (Witkin et al. in A manual for the embedded figures test. Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto, CA, 1971). In the first group-based investigation with this focus, students were selected for their extreme scores (either high or low) on each of the 'Social Skills' and 'Details/Patterns' factors of the Autism Spectrum Quotient (Baron-Cohen et al. in J Austim Dev Disord 31:5-17, 2001). The resulting 2 × 2 factorial design permitted examination of the degree to which the social and non-social autistic-like traits separately relate to EFT performance. Surprisingly, in two studies, superior EFT performance was found to relate only to greater social difficulty, suggesting that the local processing bias in autism may be linked specifically to the social deficits.