Depressive and anxiety disorders are severe and disabling conditions that result in substantial cost and global societal burden. Accurate and efficient identification is thus vital to proper diagnosis and treatment of these disorders. The Inventory of Depression and Anxiety Symptoms (IDAS) is a reliable and well-validated measure that provides dimensional assessment of both mood and anxiety disorder symptoms. The current study examined the clinical utility of the IDAS by establishing diagnostic cutoff scores and severity ranges using a large mixed sample ( N = 5,750). Results indicated that the IDAS scales are good to excellent predictors of their associated Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV diagnoses. These findings were replicated using Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fifth edition (DSM-5) criteria assessed via the Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview. We provide three cutoff scores for each scale that can be used differentially depending on the goal of their use: screening, efficiency, or diagnosis confirmation. The identified severity ranges allow users to characterize individuals as mild, moderate, or severe, providing clinical information beyond diagnostic status. Finally, the 10-item IDAS Dysphoria scale and 20-item General Depression scale demonstrate strong ability to predict internalizing diagnoses and may represent an efficient way to screen for the presence of internalizing psychopathology.

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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.

Although personality and emotion regulation abilities appear to overlap considerably, few studies have adopted an integrative approach by examining personality and emotion regulation together. Therefore, it is unclear how much incremental power emotion regulation demonstrates in predicting psychopathology beyond personality traits, and vice versa. Results from a community sample characterized by high levels of psychopathology (N = 299) indicated that personality and emotion regulation represent strongly related but distinguishable constructs, with both showing incremental power beyond the other in many cases in predicting self-reported and interview-rated psychopathology. More specifically, difficulties in responding adaptively to negative emotional experiences displayed predictive power beyond neuroticism and other personality traits in predicting internalizing psychopathology and psychoticism. Conversely, neuroticism displayed substantial incremental predictive power beyond emotion regulation and other five-factor model traits, especially for anxiety and other internalizing psychopathology. Other five-factor model traits also showed incremental predictive power in specific cases (e.g., agreeableness and conscientiousness showed specificity in predicting antagonism and disinhibition, respectively). These data provide a starting point for developing a finer-grained understanding of how emotion dysregulation and personality traits are implicated in a range of psychopathology, highlighting the value of adopting an integrative approach of examining emotion regulation and personality traits concurrently. (PsycINFO Database Record

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