The “Big Everything”: Integrating and investigating dimensional models of psychopathology, personality, personality pathology, and cognitive functioning.

Abstract

Common factors are increasingly used to model the structure of psychopathology ("p"), personality (General Factor of Personality [GFP]), pathological personality (General Factor of Pathological Personality [GFPP]), and intelligence ("g"). Using 4 waves spanning ages 18 -29 in a cohort of college students (baseline n ϭ 489), this study used indicators of psychopathology, personality, pathological personality, and cognitive functioning to compare models that included Cognitive Functioning, p, GFP, GFPP, and a "Big Everything" factor (which included cross-domain measures as indicators). GFP, GFPP, and p exhibited substantial overlap, and the Big Everything factor accounted for considerable variance in psychopathology, personality, and pathological personality indicators. Only a self-report measure of cognitive functioning loaded significantly onto the Big Everything. This study highlights concerns in the pursuit of identifying and reifying common factors based on the modeling of residual variances and limitations of using factor modeling to determine the structure of psychologically relevant phenomena.

Folk Classification and Factor Rotations: Whales, Sharks, and the Problems With the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP)

“…Distress is then combined with other heterogeneous groupings (e.g., fear, eating pathology, mania, sexual problems) under the umbrella of “internalizing.” As one moves up the hierarchy, the scores become less and less useful. As noted by Littlefield and colleagues (2021), “currently, there is no clear consensus . .…”

The Five-Factor Model of Personality and the Structure of Psychopathology in Adolescence

“…Like previous studies, the cross-sectional associations between the GFP and the p factor in Study 1 (between r = .42, p <.001 and r = .47, p <.001) and in Study 2 (r = .52, p <.001 for T1 and r = .27, p <.001 for T2) are similar regardless of the extraction method employed to obtain the GFP (van der Linden et al, 2017). Beta indices are also similar in magnitude to the correlations reported by Rosenstrom et al (2019), and are somewhat lower than those reported by Oltmanns et al (2018) and Littlefield et al (2020). Overall, our results support that these general factors share a considerable amount of variance, and may reflect the extent of impairment or dysfunction in respective persons' lives, irrespectively of whether that impairment is attributed to psychopathological symptoms, personality disorders or a certain personality configuration (Oltmanns et al, 2018).…”

“…This continuity-based perspective on psychopathology can be extended to associations between personality and psychopathology given, on the one hand, the structural similarities displayed by both personality and psychopathology (Krueger et al, 2020;Widiger et al 2018) and the high covariation between general factors of personality and psychopathology (Littlefield et al, 2020;Oltmans et al, 2018) observed throughout this thesis. Consequently, it is noticed that the normative personality variation and maladaptive dispositions related to psychopathology appear to be organized as domains that can be well-conceptualized as maladaptive extensions of FFM domains .…”

How robust is the p-factor? Using multitrait-multimethod modeling to inform the meaning of general factors of psychopathology in youth

“…In fact, because psychopathology reflects undesirable and dysfunctional behavior and experience, psychopathology ratings may be even more prone to evaluative consistency bias. Second, researchers have simultaneously modeled general factors of personality and psychopathology in adults and found that they are highly correlated (Littlefield et al, 2021;Oltmanns et al, 2018).…”