The Enduring Impact of Maladaptive Personality Traits on Relationship Quality and Health in Later Life

Abstract

Over the past five years, the St. Louis Personality and Aging Network (SPAN) has been collecting data on personality in later life with an emphasis on maladaptive personality, social integration, and health outcomes in a representative sample of 1630 adults aged 55–64 living in the St. Louis area. This program has confirmed the importance of considering both the normal range of personality and in particular the role of maladaptive traits in order to understand individuals’ relationships, life events, and health outcomes. In the current paper we discuss the explanatory benefits of considering maladaptive traits or traits associated with personality disorders when discussing the role of personality on social and health outcomes with an emphasis on adults in middle to later life, and integrate these findings into the greater literature.

Big Five Personality Traits and the General Factor of Personality as Moderators of Stress and Coping Reactions Following an Emergency Alarm on a Swiss University Campus

“…Veselka, Just, Jang, Johnson, and Vernon () reported associations of r = 0.78 and 0.77, respectively, between GFP measures of normal and pathological personality, which points towards a close correspondence. On the other hand, findings from Gleason, Weinstein, Balsis, and Oltmanns () and Morey et al () suggest that pathological personality traits may account for considerably more variance in measures of psychosocial impairment than Big Five traits. As a consequence, although the two constructs are substantially correlated, we suggest that general personality dysfunction is the better predictor of global psychopathology and psychosocial malfunction.…”

Personality and Other Lifelong Influences on Older–Age Health and Wellbeing: Preliminary Findings in Two Scottish Samples

“…With this in mind, we developed a hypothetical model of the lifelong associations among personality, cognitive ability, social class and education, and their influences on older-age health and subjective wellbeing. We expected that childhood dependability would predict older-age health and wellbeing-as other personality traits have previously been shown to in a number of aforementioned studies-through the longitudinal stability of personality (Roberts & DelVecchio, 2000;Caspi & Roberts, 2001;Hampson & Goldberg, 2006;Edmonds, Goldberg, Hampson, & Barckley, 2013) and contemporaneous associations between personality, and health and wellbeing in olderage (Gilhooly, Hanlon, Cullen, Macdonald, & Whyte, 2007;Gleason, Weinstein, Balsis, & Oltmanns, 2014;Weber et al, 2015). However, consistent with Hampson et al's (2015) argument that the cumulative consequences of lifelong health behaviours (which, once established as habits, may not require current self-control to maintain) explain more of the association between childhood conscientiousness and older-age health than older-age conscientiousness does, we also hypothesised that the effects of childhood dependability operate via other pathways.…”

Personality, Relationships, and Health

“…However, many of the most popular instruments used to assess the FFM (e.g., NEO PI‐R; Costa & McCrae, 1992a) contain items designed to assess a normal range of personality characteristics and can only provide a partial understanding of maladaptive personality traits (Haigler & Widiger, ). To demonstrate how the inclusion of both normal and maladaptive personality traits can be used to understand social relationships and health, Gleason and colleagues () discuss the impressive data set provided by the St. Louis Personality and Aging Network (SPAN). For the last 5 years, the SPAN has collected data on FFM traits and maladaptive personality traits (e.g., borderline, schizoid, antisocial), as well as social relationships and health outcomes from over 1,500 adults.…”