Negative Cognitions in the Personality Domains of the AMPD

Abstract

Healthy individuals show a tendency towards positive cognitions that is reversed during depression. This tendency is revealed by the Scrambled Sentences Task (SST), an experimental procedure that was also shown to be associated with vulnerability to suffer from depressive episodes. Here, we used the SST to map the prevalence of negative cognitions across the personality domains of criterion B of the Alternative Model of Personality Disorder (AMPD) of the DSM-5 in healthy individuals. The AMPD was developed to characterize personality in a dimensional approach spanning both healthy and pathological individuals. We expected negative cognitions to be more frequent among individuals with high negative affectivity and detachment scores, as these dimensions are thought to be associated with disorders of affect. This association was stable and significant in three separate experiments and persisted for detachment after adjusting for current depression levels. In the Five-Factor Model of Personality (FFM), in contrast, only openness failed to show any association with negative cognitions. Negative affectivity and detachment differed in the preferential association with negative and positive cognitions, respectively. This finding suggests a possible role of motivational factors related to sensitivity to negative and positive incentives in linking personality dimensions and cognitive tendencies, with an anhedonic dimension of negative cognitions being present alongside current depressive symptoms.

Cognitions in antisocial personality and their association with “dark” traits

“…Previous studies with the SST for depressive cognitions found no interaction between response times and individual differences in depressive symptoms (Kienhöfer et al, 2022). When modelling the effect of response time on sentence formation, we found no significant effect nor any significant interaction with personality traits (dark personality in antisocial sentences: t = -.63, p = .53; neuroticism in shattered assumptions sentences: t = .86, p = .39).…”

“…This distribution likely reflects the fact that, in this much larger study, we had the chance to sample D levels that occur infrequently in the community and were not present in the previous experiments. Accordingly, at the high end of D scores range the fitted rate of prosocial sentences reached much lower levels here, as shown in the Figure . At this high end, there were individuals that choose prosocial sentences with a frequency of 30% or less, completely reversing the tendency to form prosocial sentences in the population (this reversal is what we observe also in high depressive symptom levels, which are much more common than high D; see Kienhöfer et al, 2022, and the rates of negative shattered assumptions sentences in high neuroticism individuals of Figure 1B).…”

“…We could show that the rate of negative sentences elicited by this SST version was associated in a nonclinical sample with ratings of antisocial or psychopathic personality (or inversely associated with social value orientation scores) using a variety of instruments. Furthermore, there were little or no associations between these rates and measures of depressive levels, neuroticism, or negative affectivity, which are reliably associated to the SST for depressive disposition (Kienhöfer et al, 2022;Viviani, Mahler, et al, 2018).…”

“…Since detachment is a known predictor of depressive cognitions (Kienhöfer et al, 2022) and was also positively associated with CES-D scores in this experiment, we considered the possibility that detachment might represent some depressive cognitions associated with antisocial cognitions. However, after adjusting for CES-D scores, the effect of detachment remained substantially unaltered (z = -3.68, p < .001) and depressive symptom levels themselves showed no predictive effect (z = .18, p = .856).…”

“…This second set of cognitions is motivated by the low value of the welfare of others in this personality trait (Moshagen et al, 2018) as well as by the attraction that these situations exert on sadistic individuals. Data from the SST for depressive symptoms suggest a role of motivational factors in the individual propensity to select optimistic cognitions (Kienhöfer et al, 2022). We hypothesized that scores in sadism may be specifically associated with cognitions in the harm domain, as these individuals may be motivated by representations where others are physically harmed or humiliated.…”