Epistemic trust in psychopathology and the wider social world

Recent research on mentalizing emphasizes the role of epistemic trust, that is the capacity to receive and perceive interpersonally transmitted knowledge as relevant to oneself, trustworthy, and generalizable to other situations, as a risk factor for psychopathology and compromised social functioning. In this symposium, the opening presentation will provide a brief overview of the theory and explore thinking on how early social interactions and epistemic trust relate, as well as its implications for psychopathology and wider social processes. The following presentations will widen the by discussing emerging research findings on epistemic trust. Accordingly, first, differences in epistemic stance (i.e., high epistemic trust, mistrust, and credulity) between clinical and nonclinical adult groups will be discussed, and potential mechanisms underlying the relationship between epistemic trust and psychopathology will be explored. In the following presentation, a network analysis model investigating the relationships between epistemic stance and reflective functioning, emotional dysregulation, and psychopathology in a sample of nonclinical adolescents will be presented. The next presentation will consider the associations found between epistemic stance and reflective functioning, attachment, and the presence of childhood trauma, and then the relationships between personality traits, mentalization, and epistemic trust and responses to pandemic restrictions and attitudes towards vaccination. The role of conspiracy endorsement as a public health challenge for the successful containment of the COVID-19 pandemic will be highlighted in the final section, which will cover the association between adverse childhood experiences and conspiracy endorsement which appears to be mediated by epistemic trust and personality functioning. The symposium as a whole will provide insight into the clinical implications of epistemic trust from the perspective of developmental psychopathology and its relationship with wider social issues. Both academic and practitioner audiences will be targeted.