Neurocognitive impairment in dramatic personalities: histrionic, narcissistic, borderline, and antisocial disorders.

Thirty-seven patients with personalities in the dramatic cluster (DSM-III-R histrionic, narcissistic, borderline, and antisocial) and 40 controls matched for age and gender were evaluated on 16 neurocognitive variables. The evaluation screened for deficits in functions of attention, memory, language, abstraction, and behavior planning/sequencing. Analysis of variance revealed significant deficits in neurocognitive performance among patients with dramatic personalities, particularly in subtests requiring multi-step, multi-element associative operations.