Childhood adversity is linked with a variety of negative outcomes including suicide attempts and personality disorders, most commonly Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). A core feature of BPD, emotion dysregulation is often reported following early childhood adversity and contributes to both suicidal ideation and attempts. One explanation for the development of emotion dysregulation within BPD, is the biosocial model, which states that there must be an interaction between childhood emotional vulnerability and parental invalidation. Recent literature suggests that this interaction may not be necessary. Thus, the current study extended previous literature by examining childhood risk factors (i.e., ACES, parental invalidation, and childhood emotional vulnerability) as individual and interactive effects in predicting both BPD and suicide directly, as well as indirectly predicting suicide through BPD. Overall, the results indicated that all three risk factors individually predicted BPD and suicide risk and that the biosocial interaction also significantly predicts BPD and suicide risk.

The thesis describes a biosocial model of status stratification in face to face groups. The model is based on the belief that human status behavior is evolutionary extension of animal status behavior (especially primates). Each person of a group is equipped with a signaling mechanism that signals the status of domination or submision (or the status he ought to have). Status communication is among humans very subtle and primarily occurs at a nonverbal level. Status stratification often takes place automatically without the knowledge of the subjects. The biosocial model criticizes classical authors of social stratification, who explain the mechanism primarily at the cognitive level. In the practical part, the thesis attempts to use new methodology to verify the main assumption of an implicit stratification mechanism that is able to function without the involvement of cognition. The research works with a group of people with 6 probands. To indicate status in a group, playing cards were used. In each group, individuals were artificially assigned positions by playing cards. Subsequently, it was recorded how these artificial positions were reflected in the real position of member of the group. In the second part, the influence of personality trait on the position was measured. The main assumption could...