The Convergent and Discriminant Validity of Five-Factor Traits: Current and Prospective Social, Work, and Recreational Dysfunction

Abstract

The convergent and discriminant validity of Five Factor Model (FFM) personality traits with concurrent and prospective social, work, and recreational dysfunction was assessed in a large, longitudinal clinical sample. Consistent with five factor theoretical expectations, neuroticism is broadly related to dysfunction across domains; extraversion is primarily related to social and recreational dysfunction; openness to recreational dysfunction; agreeableness to social dysfunction; and conscientiousness to work dysfunction. Findings support five factor theory and the clinical assessment of normative personality traits.Five-Factor Model (FFM: Neuroticism = N, Extraversion = E, Openness to Experience = O; Agreeableness = A; Conscientiousness = C) personality traits have demonstrated validity in predicting a range of important behaviors such as physical health (Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, 2005;Grucza & Goldberg, 2007;Goodwin & Friedman, 2006), social dysfunction (Bornstein & Huprich, 2006;Donnellan, Conger, & Bryant, 2004;Eisenberg, Fabes, Guthrie, & Reiser, 2000;Karney & Bradbury, 1995;Schmitz, Hartkamp, Baldini, Rollnik, & Tress, 2001; Watson, Hubbard, & Weise, 2000), work performance (Barrick & Mount, 1991;Judge, Higgins, Thoreson, & Barrick, 1999), and recreational dysfunction (Burnett, 2006;Kircaldy, 1990;Wild, Kuiken, & Schoopflocker, 1995) even after controlling for factors such as intelligence and socioeconomic status (Roberts et al., 2007) and psychiatric diagnosis . FFM traits have also demonstrated utility predicting clinical outcomes. For example, FFM traits relate to clinically relevant outcomes such as suicidal (Kerby, 2003) and aggressive behavior (Skeem, Miller, Mulvey, Tiemann, & Monahan, 2005), substance use Ruiz, Pincus, & Schinka, 2008), and the effectiveness of treatment for other disorders (Bottlender & Soyka, 2005). Increasing evidence for the clinical utility of the FFM has led some to argue for their routine use in clinical assessment (e.g., Costa, 2008;Widiger & Trull, 2007 Demonstrations that FFM traits bear specific relations to domains of dysfunction predicted by five factor theory (FFT; McCrae & Costa, 1996; would strengthen the argument for including personality traits in clinical assessment. FFT proposes that the FFM traits represent the broadest level of basic tendencies in a comprehensive and universal description of human personality. These basic tendencies are thought to predispose characteristic adaptations (e.g., attitudes and self-concept). For example, the basic tendency to be agreeable may lead to adaptations such as forgiveness and an inclination to cooperate in social circumstances; the basic tendency to be open to experience may lead to adaptations such as travelling or having many hobbies (McCrae & Costa, 1999).The functionality of characteristic adaptations is a critical concern of clinical assessment because maladaptations are often therapeutic targets. Maladaptivity can be organized into broad domains that denote when and where dysfunction occurs. For example, social...

Personality Assessment in DSM-5: Empirical Support for Rating Severity, Style, and Traits

“…Results, in conjunction with previous reports from the CLPS sample on the incremental validity of FFM traits over PD symptoms (e.g., Hopwood et al, , 2009Morey et al, 2007); also support assessing personality traits separately from either PD severity or style. One might have anticipated that normative traits would relate more directly to the stylistic dimensions identified in the PD symptoms than we observed.…”

“…In fact, given that a similar normative trait constellation involving high levels of neuroticism combined with low extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness generally characterizes PD (Morey et al, 2002;Saulsman & Page, 2004), traits might be anticipated to relate as strongly to a general PD severity composite as to stylistic elements of PD. As suggested in Bornstein's model, normative traits are also clinically important for reasons beyond their correspondence to PD constructs or their ability to depict PD propensity more generally, including their ability to depict different kinds of dysfunction specifically (Hopwood et al, 2009) whether or not an individual has a PD . Thus, a third important question for DSM-5 is whether PDs and traits should be assessed in parallel or whether traits should supplant diagnostic constructs as indicators of stylistic elements of personality pathology.…”

“…CLPS data have previously revealed the differential stabilities of PD symptoms (McGlashan et al, 2005), differential stabilities and predictive validities of trait and pathological personality models , the specificity of trait predictions (Hopwood et al, 2009), and the predictive validity of traits independent of PD status . Taken together, these results favor explicitly separating pathological disorder dimensions from normative trait dimensions and measuring both in the assessment of personality pathology.…”

Stability of the DSM-5 Section III pathological personality traits and their longitudinal associations with psychosocial functioning in personality disordered individuals.

“…Neuroticism has consistently demonstrated a relative lack of discriminant validity in predicting functional outcomes. However, a major difference between our results and those reported by Hopwood and colleagues (2009) and Mullins-Sweatt and Widiger (2010) is that they examined normative range traits, whereas here we examine maladaptive traits. Maladaptive trait measures, including the PID-5, generally tend to associate with negative emotionality, disagreeableness, and lack of conscientiousness, regardless of the traits’ specific content (e.g., Haigler & Widiger, 2001; Watson et al, 2013).…”

Childhood malnutrition and maltreatment are linked with personality disorder symptoms in adulthood: Results from a Barbados lifespan cohort

“…The survivors of malnutrition in this cohort also showed differences from controls in 17 of the 30 lower-order NEO-PI-R facets, displaying a personality profile with heightened anxiety, depression, and vulnerability to stress, lowered interpersonal orientation, lowered intellectual curiosity as well as withdrawal and distrust and a lowered sense of self-efficacy or competence. The extent to which these differences in personality trait profiles might relate to clinically-defined personality symptoms or disorders, however, remained to be demonstrated, although prior studies linking abnormal NEO-PI-R trait profiles to clinically significant problems in living and dysfunction in the social, work, and recreational domains suggest that there is merit to this hypothesis (Hopwood et al, 2009). Consideration of a profile of scores made up of multiple facet differences is not only likely to be more informative than focus on single traits one at a time, but also more likely to reflect the constellation of features that are included in the PD categories.…”