Cognitive Neuroscience Approaches to Personality Disorders

This chapter describes a cognitive neuroscience approach to understanding the psychological and neural processes that underlie personality and behavior. It explicates the utility of the cognitive neuroscience approach and the fundamental principles of the methods and how to interpret the findings. The chapter reviews the different neuroimaging tools and approaches that can be used to investigate brain structure and function. In doing so, it provides detailed information about what each method measures and how issues to consider when evaluating these measurements and their functional significance. The chapter provides the reader an appreciation of how understanding brain structure and function in vivo can serve as a bridge between molecular/genetic and symptom-based data to enrich the pathophysiology of personality disorders.