Long-term stability of personality traits in a clinical psychiatric sample

Abstract

Background: The aim of this study was to describe personality traits in psychiatric patients and to investigate whether these traits are stable over 13 years. Methods: A total of 95 individuals who were patients at a psychiatric outpatients' clinic in 2003 completed the Swedish universities Scales of Personality (SSP). Scores from 2003 were compared with SSP scores from 2016. Based on the current score on the comprehensive psychopathological rating scaleself rating for affective disorders (CPRS-S-A), the participants were divided into two groups representing 'good' and 'poor' current mental states, to investigate the effect of current mental state on reports of personality traits. Results: Out of 13 personality traits, 11 showed a significant change in mean T-score over the study interval. The group with lower CPRS-S-A scores showed a significant change in T-score for 10 traits, whereas in the group with higher CPRS-S-A scores only 3 traits showed a significant change. Conclusions: The findings support the theory that personality is changeable over the course of life, also in psychiatric patients. We do not know if persisting psychiatric symptoms halter change or if deviant personality traits cause psychiatric symptoms to continue.

Thirteen-year follow-up of long-term treated psychotic disorder: personality aspects

“…Individuals with psychotic disorders often show a more severe disease state. Provided this assumption, the results in the present study agree well with the two previous studies on long-term outcomes measured with SSP [18,48]. When compared to the mean-level change of the KSP studies, the present study is in agreement in that the studies analysing non-psychiatrically adult individuals did not show any substantial change similar to the controls of the present report [56,58,62,63].…”

“…Considering studies where prominent interventions were performed, makes the picture more complex. The relatively well-functioning individuals treated with long-term psychotherapy displayed substantial changes in several personality traits after the treatment [61], which seems partly similar to the less anxious and depressed patients in the study of Spangenberg et al [48]. How to classify individuals undergoing forensic investigation [59], suicide attempters [55], patients treated for epilepsy with frontal resections [49], and patients successfully treated for epilepsy [53], who all displayed substantial reductions in one or two of the neuroticism-related KSP scales at follow-up, is less obvious.…”

“…SSP or its closely related predecessor KSP. We are aware of two previous studies that have used SSP for long-term follow-up [18,48] and 14 studies that investigated long-term follow-up (22 months or longer) using KSP [12,[49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62]. Rank-order stability in studies using SSP or KSP Seven of the long-term KSP studies provided stability estimates, with overall mean correlations for nine of the 15 scales varying between 0.63 and 0.76, whereas for three (Social Desirability, Irritability, Guilt) the correlations were at or below 0.50 (Supplementary Table 6).…”

“…The results when a long-term mean-level change of personality traits using SSP in a clinical psychiatric sample was investigated showed that individuals affected by more severe symptoms showed higher stability in personality than individuals with milder symptoms [48]. Individuals with psychotic disorders often show a more severe disease state.…”

Cluster analysis of personality traits in psychiatric patients with borderline personality disorder

“…Later in the study, seven new raters were trained before being included as interviewers. They showed complete agreement regarding current BPD diagnosis in four out of five interviews (80%), with prevalence and bias-adjusted kappa [ 39 ] ranging from 0.6 to 1.0 between assessors.…”