Focusing Personality Assessment on the Person: Modeling General, Shared, and Person Specific Processes in Personality and Psychopathology

Abstract

Personality and psychopathology are composed of dynamic and interactive processes among diverse psychological systems, manifesting over time and in response to an individual’s natural environment. Ambulatory assessment techniques promise to revolutionize assessment practices by allowing access to the dynamic data necessary to study these processes directly. Assessing manifestations of personality and psychopathology naturalistically in an individual’s own ecology allows for dynamic modeling of key behavioral processes. However, advances in dynamic data collection have highlighted the challenges of both fully understanding an individual (via idiographic models) and how s/he compares to others (as seen in nomothetic models). Methods are needed that can simultaneously model idiographic (i.e., person-specific) processes and nomothetic (i.e., general) structure from intensive longitudinal personality assessments. Here we present a method, Group Iterative Multiple Model Estimation (GIMME) for simultaneously studying general, shared (i.e., in subgroups), and person-specific processes in intensive longitudinal behavioral data. We first provide introduction to the GIMME method, followed by a demonstration of its use in a sample of individuals diagnosed with personality disorder who completed daily diaries over 100 consecutive days.

Subjectifying the Personality State: Theoretical Underpinnings and an Empirical Example

“…The present work joins several other recent attempts to conceptualize within‐person personality dynamics (e.g. Geukes & Back, 2017; Hopwood et al, 2019; Wright et al, 2019). Its distinction comes in part from the inspiration it draws from widely used clinical models, which converge on the idea of multiple subjective personality ‘states’ as separable organizational units.…”

Indicators of Affect Dynamics: Structure, Reliability, and Personality Correlates

“…Participants received daily questionnaires containing retrospective measurement of affect over 30 days that were filled out before going to bed. The second sample (Wright et al ., 2019) included individuals with a personality disorder diagnosis who completed daily retrospective assessments of affect over 100 days. The third sample (Wright et al ., 2017) consisted of dyads who completed a 21‐day period of ecological momentary assessment (3.7 assessments per day on average) including individuals who were engaged in outpatient psychiatric treatment and their significant others.…”

Personalized models of personality disorders: using a temporal network method to understand symptomatology and daily functioning in a clinical sample

“…Wright et al . (2019) also used the subgrouping component of GIMME aiming to map the interplay among stress, interpersonal behavior, and affect. The current manuscript is conceptually and methodologically distinct from this past work: We used the multiple solutions version of GIMME and variables concerning the broader forms of personality pathology aiming to go beyond network mapping by using network features to predict PD symptoms and daily stress.…”

“…Although person-specific temporal networks can illuminate heterogeneous phenomena, there is clear clinical value in being able to understand homogenous processes to the extent that they exist. Thus, ideal models of PDs and psychopathology should be able to generalize somewhat across individuals, while leaving room for personalized elements (Wright et al ., 2015 a ; Wright and Zimmermann, 2019). Indeed, research has begun to demonstrate the utility of person-specific temporal approaches in understanding psychopathology (e.g.…”