Tracking variations in daily questionable health behaviors and their psychological roots: a preregistered experience sampling study

Our study aimed to link personality traits (Big Five plus proneness to psychotic-like experiences and behaviors, conceptualized as Disintegration) with clinical characteristics (gender, age, density of episodes, average antipsychotic doses, functionality, and symptom scores). We analyzed 137 patients with psychotic disorders (ICD-10: F20–F29) who had at least one psychotic episode, with illness duration ≤10 years, in remission. Canonical correlation analysis revealed that (1) Psychotic fragility (defined by high density of illness episodes, older age, and more severe symptoms) is associated with high Disintegration and Neuroticism; (2) Disorder severity (high antipsychotic doses, dysfunctionality, severe symptoms, younger age) is linked to low Agreeableness and Openness; and (3) Well-functioning patients (better functionality, milder symptoms) are predicted by a resilient personality profile. These findings deepen our understanding of personality–psychopathology relationships.

Personality Correlates of Certain Clinical Characteristics of Patients With Psychotic Disorders

Ristić,

Knežević,

Ristić

et al. 2024

Redefining Personality Structure

Knežević,

Lazarević,

Scherhag

2024

Evidence accumulated over the past two decades suggests that a comprehensive taxonomy of individual differences in personality is incomplete without postulating the existence of a trait-like disposition to phenomena that could be labeled psychotic-like experiences and behaviors (PLEBs). Such a disposition, called Psychoticism, was first proposed by Eysenck (1952), but the evidence did not support his conceptualization of the disposition. Nevertheless, evidence supports the trait-like nature of the PLEBs domain, showing temporal and cross-cultural stability and a dimensionality similar to that of the other basic personality traits. Recently, another model of the domain was proposed (Knežević et al., 2017), postulating a hierarchical structure with nine subdimensions that converge strongly on the higher-order factor (designated Disintegration). It was postulated that Disintegration reflects individual differences in the tendency to see, cognize, and feel connections among factually unrelated events or falsepositive detection errors, leading to phenomena captured by the subdimensions of Disintegration. Disintegration was found to be distinct from the personality traits postulated by models such as the Big Five or HEXACO and implicated in a wide range of behavioral tendencies, from those of clinical relevancesuch as psychosis, depression, narcissism, post-traumatic stress disorder, exposure to stressful events (e.g., Knežević et al., 2022) to those of nonclinical significance, such as irrational beliefs, sociopolitical attitudes, worldviews, thinking styles, criminal behavior, and questionable medical practices (e.g., Lazarević et al., 2023).This topical issue includes a collection of papers that further demonstrate the separation of Disintegration/ Psychoticism from Big Five and HEXACOusing markers of PLEBs different from Disintegration (Watson et al., 2024, this issue) and new samples, including

The HEXACO–Disintegration (HEXACOD) Personality Model in Early and Late Adolescence

Lazarević,

Pfattheicher,

Krstić

et al. 2024

This study investigated the robustness of the seven-factor HEXACO–Disintegration (HEXACOD) personality model in children and adolescents, across three age groups (10–13, 14–15, and 16–18 years). Using exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM), we assessed the invariance of the proposed seven-factor model. The results supported the HEXACOD model's metric invariance across age groups. The Disintegration factor lay outside the HEXACO traits, corroborating the claim that the HEXACO model does not capture a wide range of psychotic-like experiences and behaviors (PLEBs). Moderated nonlinear factor analysis (MNLFA) also showed stability of the HEXACOD model across ages. Furthermore, the results show that Disintegration presents a trait-like disposition on the same level of coherence and robustness as HEXACO traits even in children and adolescents.