Associations between epistemic trust and the severity of personality disorder: Results from a study comparing patients with personality disorder, anxiety disorder, and controls

Early childhood adversity may dispose an individual to adopt a rigid and pervasive hypervigilant position toward information coming from others, resulting in high levels of epistemic mistrust (EM), which is supposed to increase the risk of developing psychopathology. A more intrinsic relationship between EM and the development of personality disorders (PDs) is assumed. Although the theory of epistemic trust (ET) is rather novel, it has quickly become widely accepted in the field, despite much empirical evidence. This is the first study investigating the level of ET and associations between ET and PDs among patients with PD, anxiety disorders, and a community sample. Our results demonstrated more severe impairments in ET in patients, and associations found between ET and the severity and types of PDs corroborate the theoretically assumed model. Future research with larger samples and prospective designs is needed to explore further and substantiate the theoretical assumptions about ET.