1b - Methodological Advancements Needed in Neuroimaging Research on Personality Disorders: Commentary on Neuroimaging in Personality Disorders

Summary

Expanding upon Chan and colleagues’ (this volume) thorough review of neuroimaging research in personality disorders (PDs), this commentary highlights two issues that plague much of the extant neuroimaging research in the field. First, many studies continue to use a region of interest (ROI) approach that is insufficient for understanding the complex behavioral dysfunctions representative of PDs. Second, many of the selected experimental tasks do not provide sufficient precision (e.g., condition manipulations) to dissociate mechanism from behavior within and across PDs. Beyond identifying these two issues, the authors suggest new approaches for future research in PDs. For example, they discuss approaches that combine neuroimaging data with other measures to build profiles or “fingerprints” of different PDs, and implement methods, such as computational modeling, that maximize the richness of neuroimaging in PDs. These approaches leverage neuroimaging data in various ways that allow for specification of distinct and overlapping neural mechanisms underlying behavior, which is crucial to understanding the complicated symptomology of PDs.