The goal of this study was to explicate how the lower order facets of extraversion are related to psychopathology. We used a "bottom-up" approach in which specific extraversion scales from 3 comprehensive personality inventories were used to model these facets as latent factors. We collected both self-report and interview measures of a broad range of psychopathology from a large community sample. Replicating previous findings using a similar approach (Naragon-Gainey & Watson, 2014; Naragon-Gainey, Watson, & Markon, 2009), structural analyses yielded four factors: Positive Emotionality, Sociability, Assertiveness, and Experience Seeking. Scores on these latent dimensions were related to psychopathology in correlational analyses and in two sets of regressions (the first series used the four facets as predictors; the second included composite scores on the other Big Five domains as additional predictors). These results revealed a striking level of specificity. As predicted, Positive Emotionality displayed especially strong negative links to depressive symptoms and diagnoses. Sociability also was negatively related to psychopathology, showing particularly strong associations with indicators of social dysfunction and the negative symptoms of schizotypy (i.e., social anxiety, social aloofness, and restricted affectivity). Assertiveness generally had weak associations at the bivariate level but was negatively related to social anxiety and was positively correlated with some forms of externalizing. Finally, Experience Seeking had substantial positive associations with a broad range of indicators related to externalizing and bipolar disorder; it also displayed negative links to agoraphobia. These differential correlates demonstrate the importance of examining personality-psychopathology relations at the specific facet level.

The goal of this study was to explicate the nature of the associations between anomalous sleep experiences-that is, phenomena such as hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, sleep paralysis, and nightmares-and psychopathology. The participants were 406 adults, nearly half of whom (46.3%) had received-or were currently receiving-mental health treatment. We examined a more comprehensive range of psychopathology (both self-reported symptoms and interview-based diagnoses) than has been measured in previous research; the assessment battery contained multiple indicators of internalizing (including both depression and anxiety), substance use, bipolar disorder, dissociation, and psychosis/schizotypy. In addition, we examined the incremental predictive power of anomalous sleep experiences in relation to the Big Five personality traits. An Anomalous Sleep Experiences factor was defined by 4 variables: the General Sleep Experiences scale of the Iowa Sleep Experiences Survey, plus the Sleep Hallucinations, Sleep Paralysis, and Nightmares scales from the Iowa Sleep Disturbances Inventory. Anomalous Sleep Experiences was strongly and broadly related to self-rated and interview-based indicators of psychopathology, and also displayed impressive incremental predictive power vis-a `-vis the Big Five. Anomalous Sleep Experiences exhibited substantial specificity in the self-report data: As predicted, it correlated more strongly with dissociation, positive schizotypy, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and panic disorder than with other symptoms. The interview-based analyses showed less specificity, although Anomalous Sleep Experiences again demonstrated relatively strong associations with psychotic disorders. Overall, our data indicate that anomalous sleep experiences are broadly related to psychopathology, with particularly strong links to dissociation and positive symptoms of psychosis/schizotypy.

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.

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