Disorders and Coherence of the Embodied Self (DISCOS) Project
The DISCOS project, which is funded by a three million euro EU Marie Curie Research Training Award, is a partnership that involves nine sites across Europe, including the Anna Freud Centre. The Centre's participation is comprised of various studies, as outlined below.
Taking its lead from studies carried out in Budapest at the Institute for Psychological Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the AFC DISCOS Project comprises a number of major developmental studies that will explore the development of social cognition in early childhood and adolescence (i.e. how children and adolescents become increasingly aware of their social, as well as individual, existence). This study will use a range of methodologies including the assessment of attachment in infancy, Child Attachment Interview (CAI) and the Adolescent Attachment Interview, together with a number of theory of mind tasks and behavioural measures of mentalization such as contingent responding. We will also apply modern electrophysiological methods (dense array EEG) to look at the association of brain maturation and reactivity with the emergence of the social-emotional self.
The project will pay particular attention to investigating possible links between the childhood and adolescent antecedents of borderline personality disorder and developmental deficits in mentalization associated with childhood and adolescent trauma. We are particularly concerned to understand better how trauma can potentially undermine the appropriate functioning of the social brain. That is, we will assess whether borderline personality disorder is associated with early problems with mentalization which in turn might create a vulnerability to trauma.
We will also carry out a large school-based community study, which will assess a normative sample of children aged between 11 and 17 years. Through this study, it will be possible to examine the relationships between self-harm, impulsiveness and other early indicators of emerging personality disorder.
The Anna Freud Centre is developing ways to measure mentalization in borderline personality disorder in collaboration with the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard (John Gunderson) and the Menninger Department of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine (Glen Gabbard).
The team is developing these measurements using both self-report and innovative experimental techniques, including the use of tasks developed by economists for assessing social exchange such as the Trust Task and the Prisoner's Dilemma and Simon Baron-Cohen's () Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, as well as a battery of mentalization measures that used for the ongoing randomized controlled trial (RCT) of mentalization-based psychotherapy for borderline personality disorder. These techniques lend themselves to study using dense array EEG techniques as well as fMRI methods of imaging brain activity. An outcome of the program is the linking of social cognitive and brain measures to develop sophisticated assessments of personality functioning and a better understanding of individual differences in the establishment of the self.