Do maladaptive behaviors exist at one or both ends of personality traits?

Abstract

In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) personality disorder trait model, maladaptive behavior is located at one end of continuous scales. Widiger and colleagues, however, have argued that maladaptive behavior exists at both ends of trait continua. We propose that the role of evaluative variance differentiates these two perspectives and that once evaluation is isolated, maladaptive behaviors emerge at both ends of nonevaluative trait dimensions. In Study 1, we argue that evaluative variance is worthwhile to measure separately from descriptive content because it clusters items by valence regardless of content (e.g., lazy and workaholic; apathetic and anxious; gullible and paranoid; timid and hostile, etc.), which is unlikely to describe a consistent behavioral style. We isolate evaluation statistically (Study 2) and at the time of measurement (Study 3) to show that factors unrelated to valence evidence maladaptive behavior at both ends. We argue that nonevaluative factors, which display maladaptive behavior at both ends of continua, may better approximate ways in which individuals actually behave.

Criterion validity of the general factor of psychopathology in a prospective study of girls

“…For example, the general factor could reflect specious correlations arising from common method variancebecause the same informants and methods are used to assess each dimension of psychopathology (Campbell & Fiske, 1959;Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003). Similarly, the general factor could arise from respondents' general tendency to rate all negatively worded items similarly (Pettersson et al, 2014) or from implicit theories that certain emotions and behaviors tend to occur together (Schneider, 1973).…”

Quantifying Users' Beliefs about Software Updates

“…Rather than grouping the beliefs thematically, based on our own subjective judgments, we decided to perform principal component analysis (PCA) [14] with Varimax rotation on the responses of participants from our AMT sample. This technique has previously been used extensively in psychology and humancomputer interaction literature [28], [16], [25], [12], as it yields more descriptive factors which are robust to correlation. However, we also confirmed our factor loadings using an Oblimin rotation.…”

Convergent and Discriminant Validity of the Five Factor Form and the Sliderbar Inventory

“…Its inclusion of maladaptive variants at both poles of each item is relatively unique, but apparent as well within another recently developed measure of maladaptive personality, the SI (Pettersson et al, 2014), as well as the more historical SPTS (Stone, 1993). The results of the current study demonstrated good convergent and discriminant validity for the FFF (and SI-FFM) assessment of the FFM, as well as its assessment of maladaptive variants of agreeableness and conscientiousness and its relationship to other measures assessing for a bipolarity of maladaptive personality functioning.…”

“…The Sliderbar Inventory (Pettersson et al, 2014). The SI is a self-report measure that consists of 77 items to assess components of personality disorders.…”

“…In Pettersson et al (2012), traits such as workaholic and uptight emerged for conscientiousness; and gullible, timid, and submissive emerged for agreeableness. Pettersson et al (2014) subsequently developed a self-report measure, the SI, whose items explicitly incorporate this structure. For example, an "aggressive/submissive" SI item contrasts "I get mad easily and often get into fights" at one pole with "I am a meek person" at the opposite pole of the same item.…”