The Centrality of a Representation-Based Framework for Understanding the Emotional Underpinnings of Personality Pathology: A Commentary on “The emotional underpinnings of personality pathology: Implications for psychotherapy”

Kramer and Timulak are to be commended for taking on such a challenging and important task in offering transdiagnostic psychological interventions for personality pathology as based on the Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD; American Psychiatric Association, 2013). To do this, the authors articulate a nosological framework which centers emotional processing deficits as the core mechanism underlying all manifestations of personality pathology. The authors provide the field with much food for thought in doing so, and in our view, the framework and its resulting interventions contain many strengths and have plausibility for creating change in patients struggling with particular forms of personality disorder (PD).