Abstract
Personality impairment is a core feature of personality disorders in both current (i.e., Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition [DSM-5] personality disorders, International Classification of Diseases,11th revision personality disorders) and emerging (i.e., DSM-5’s alternative model of personality disorders) models of psychopathology. Yet, despite its importance within clinical nosology, attempts to identify its optimal lower-order structure have yielded inconsistent findings. Given its presence in diagnostic models, it is important to better understand its empirical structure across a variety of instantiations. To the degree that impairment is multifaceted, various factors may have different nomological networks and varied implications for assessment, diagnosis, and treatment. Therefore, participants were recruited from two large public universities in the present preregistered study (N = 574) to explore the construct’s structure with exploratory “bass-ackward” factor analyses at the item level. Participants completed over 250 items from six commonly used measures of personality dysfunction. Criterion variables in its nomological network were also collected (e.g., general and pathological personality traits, internalizing/externalizing behavior, and personality disorders) using both self- and informant-reports. These factor analyses identified four lower-order facets of impairment (i.e., negative self-regard, disagreeableness, intimacy problems, and lack of direction), all of which showed moderate to strong overlap with traits from both general and pathological models of personality.
Keywords
alternative model of personality disorders, personality impairment, five factor model
Date of this Version
1-1-2024
Recommended Citation
Sleep, Chelsea E.; Phillips, Nathaniel L.; Du, Tianwei V.; Vize, Colin; Lynam, Donald R.; and Miller, Joshua D., "Examining the structure of personality dysfunction." (2024). Department of Psychological Sciences Faculty Publications. Paper 104.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/psychpubs/104
Comments
This is the author-accepted manuscript of Sleep, C. E., Phillips, N. L., Du, T. V., Vize, C., Lynam, D. R., & Miller, J. D. (2024). Examining the structure of personality dysfunction. Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 15(2), 110–121. Copyright APA, and the version of record can be found at DOI: 10.1037/per0000648.