Fig. 1

The Natural Pedagogy Model of Personality Disorder. Illustrates the interactions between social dysfunction, failure in social communication, epistemic mistrust, and imperviousness to social influence that underpin personality disorder. Emotion dysregulation, disrupted attachment histories and the disorganized insecure attachment system generate social/interpersonal dysfunction. This undermines accurate social communication, causing social disruption, the misinterpretation of social signals, and difficulty in recognising ostensive cues from others. These difficulties in the area of social communication can give rise to epistemic mistrust in relation to the social environment. This is not inherently a maladaptive process: epistemic vigilance has a natural function. However, the absence of epistemic trust sets a limit upon social learning. This can render the individual potentially unable to function effectively within their social environment and can lead to further disruption in the social network, leaving the individual increasingly isolated and prone to further social/interpersonal dysfunction