Aspects of extraversion and their associations with psychopathology.

Abstract

Extraversion shows both negative and positive associations with psychopathology. Previous work in this area has focused largely on either a broad higher order extraversion domain score or on specific lower-order extraversion facets. The goal of this study was to explicate how two intermediate aspects of the trait—communal extraversion and agentic extraversion—relate to psychopathology. We examined these relations using the Communal Extraversion (e.g., enjoy spending time with people, would describe myself as cheerful, like places that are crowded and exciting) and Agentic Extraversion (e.g., speak my mind, take charge in a group of people, like the sensation of going really fast) scales from the Faceted Inventory of the Five-Factor Model (FI-FFM; Watson, Nus, & Wu, 2019). As expected, Communal Extraversion generally showed negative associations with psychopathology; it had particularly strong links to indicators of internalizing, including depression symptoms (correlations generally ranged from −.40 to −.60) and various forms of social dysfunction (most correlations ranged from −.35 to −.60). In marked contrast, Agentic Extraversion tended to have positive associations with psychopathology; it displayed particularly substantial links to indicators of mania, narcissism/narcissistic personality disorder, and traits related to externalizing (correlations generally ranged from .25 to .50). Regression results demonstrated that aspect-level analyses generated substantial increases in predictive power over the FI-FFM Extraversion domain score. This basic pattern of results replicated over time, across gender, and across both self-rated and interview-based indicators of psychopathology. These findings establish the value of examining relations with extraversion at the aspect level.

Facet-Level Personality Development in the Transition to Adolescence: Maturity, Disruption, and Gender Differences

“…Cross-sectional research on facet-level traits indicates that subordinate factors of extraversion may show unique associations with internalizing psychopathology (Watson et al, 2015). These studies indicate that facets related to communion (including sociability, activity, and positive affect) tend to show strong negative relationships with depression, anxiety, and externalizing pathology, while facets related to agency (including social dominance and sensation-seeking) are unrelated to internalizing and in fact, positively associated with externalizing psychopathology (Watson et al, 2019). Therefore, the facetspecific patterns of development in Extraversion seen in the present study may merit further scrutiny vis-à-vis their connection to the development of both internalizing and externalizing disorders.…”

Examining the Criterion Validity and Diagnostic Specificity of Self-Report Measures of Narcissism and Mania

“…Participants were 214 adults from the greater South Bend metropolitan area (this is Sample 3 in Watson, Ellickson-Larew, et al, 2019). 1 Individuals who had provided their contact information from previous studies conducted at the Center for Advanced Measurement of Personality and Psychopathology were recruited first; others were recruited though flyers posted in local mental health clinics and via word of mouth.…”

“…The data we report here are taken from a study that was designed to investigate the psychopathological correlates of extraversion (see Watson, Ellickson-Larew, et al, 2019). Thus, the assessment battery focused particularly on symptoms and disorders that previously were shown to be negatively (e.g., depression, avoidant PD) or positively (e.g., mania, narcissistic PD, histrionic PD, psychopathy, substance use) related to extraversion.…”

An fMRI investigation of the relations between Extraversion, internalizing psychopathology, and neural activation following reward receipt in the Human Connectome Project sample

“…For example, individuals with depressive symptoms appear to be less willing to exert effort to gain reward, and show reduced ability to integrate information about the probability of reward into their decision-making (Treadway, Bossaller, Shelton, & Zald, 2012). Perhaps most pertinently, anhedonia, or a pervasive, reduced 1 To add to this complexity: while not reviewed extensively here, high levels of Extraversion have also been specifically linked to aspects of mania such as elation and excess energy (Watson et al, 2019a(Watson et al, , 2019b. Moreover, Extraversion has been linked to personality disorder constructs typically associated with externalizing psychopathology, namely narcissism and psychopathy.…”