Personality and group psychotherapy outcome: The lack of influence of traits from the five-factor model.

Abstract

Although there is accumulating evidence of the importance of personality in predicting group psychotherapy outcomes, the extent to which Big Five personality traits predict group psychotherapy outcomes is debatable. Thus far, findings from individual treatment studies suggest Big Five traits have a marginal-to-small impact on the success of psychotherapy. Yet, results from the handful of group therapy studies on Big Five traits are equivocal. Moreover, extant research on Big Five traits and group treatment outcomes do not address potential dependencies in their data and, despite conducting multiple significance tests, neglect to correct for an inflated Type I error rate. Objective: We addressed these limitations through the largest, most methodologically rigorous investigation of the extent to which Big Five traits predict group treatment outcomes to date. Method: Recently discharged patients with mental health problems (N = 128; M age = 41.7, SD = 11.6) receiving short-term group therapy completed a measure of Big Five traits (NEO Personality Inventory-Revised) at pretreatment and measures of depression symptoms (Beck Depression Inventory) and anxiety symptoms (Beck Anxiety Inventory) at pretreatment, posttreatment, and 6-month follow-up. To address potential dependencies, we adopted a multilevel modeling strategy and, to address the multiple comparison problem, we used the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure. Results: None of the Big Five traits predicted smaller or greater reductions in depression or anxiety symptoms at posttreatment or 6-month follow-up. Conclusion: We found no evidence that the Big Five traits were associated with group psychotherapy outcome. Highlights and Implications• To investigate the influence of personality traits on group psychotherapy outcome we assessed traits from the Big Five Model of personality at pretreatment and depression and anxiety symptoms at pretreatment, posttreatment, and 6-month follow-up in recently discharged patients receiving group Cognitive-Behavioral psychotherapy.• Multilevel modeling indicated that Big Five traits did not significantly influence symptom reduction at posttreatment or 6-month follow-up.• Considering the methodological shortcoming of prior research alongside our null findings the claimed clinical utility of Big Five traits on group treatment outcomes remains unsubstantiated. This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

Perfectionism and its role in depressive disorders.

“…Results lend support for the PSDM in a clinical context and underscore the importance of perfectionism’s influence on social disconnection that should be taken into account when treating patients with perfectionism (also see Shahar et al, 2004). Importantly, in subsequent analyses, Smith, Hewitt, et al, 2021 found that, unlike perfectionism, Big Five personality traits did not predict greater or lower symptom change. This lends support to the specificity of Hewitt et al’s (2020) finding and underscores that perfectionism is not only relevant to the experience of depression but also can impede treatment benefit.…”

“…This suggests socially prescribed perfectionism might function as a concomitant of depression, although, as indicated above, it does interact with stressors in predicting depressive symptoms. Moreover, we recently reported meta-analytic evidence derived from clinical and nonclinical studies that the relationship between socially prescribed perfectionism and depressive symptoms is unidirectional, with socially prescribed perfectionism predicting increased depression but not the reverse (Smith, Hewitt, et al, 2021). However, there is need to examine this issue further longitudinally as Vaillancourt and Haltigan (2018) suggested in the McMaster Teen Study that depression might predict socially prescribed perfectionism rather than vice versa.…”

“…In particular, research has underscored the importance of perfectionism as a vulnerability factor in depressive disorders (see Hewitt & Flett, 1990, 1993; Hewitt et al, 1996). Likewise, a recent meta-analysis found that perfectionism prospectively predicts depression symptom severity (Smith, Hewitt, et al, 2021). Moreover, perfectionism may be an increasingly important vulnerability factor in depression, given that it appears to be on the rise among university-aged adults (Curran & Hill, 2019).…”