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Background On the way toward an agreed dimensional taxonomy for personality disorders (PD), several pivotal questions remain unresolved. We need to know which dimensions produce problems and in what domains of life; whether impairment can be found at one or both extremes of each dimension; and whether, as is increasingly advocated, some dimensions measure personality functioning whereas others reflect style. Method To gain this understanding, we administered the Temperament and Character Inventory to a sample of 862 consecutively attended outpatients, mainly with PDs (61.2%). Using regression analysis, we examined the ability of personality to predict 39 variables from the Life Outcome Questionnaire concerning career, relationships, and mental health. Results Persistence stood out as the most important dimension regarding career success, with 24.2% of explained variance on average. Self-directedness was the best predictor of social functioning (21.1%), and harm avoidance regarding clinical problems (34.2%). Interpersonal dimensions such as reward dependence and cooperativeness were mostly inconsequential. In general, dimensions were detrimental only in one of their poles. Conclusions Although personality explains 9.4% of life problems overall, dimensions believed to measure functioning (character) were not better predictors than those measuring style (temperament). The notion that PD diagnoses can be built upon the concept of “personality functioning” is unsupported.

Despite general support for dimensional models of personality disorder, it is currently unclear which, and how many, dimensions a taxonomy of this kind should include. In an attempt to obtain an empirically-based, comprehensive, and usable structure of personality, three instruments – The Temperament and Character Inventory-Revised (TCI-R), the Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire-4 + (PDQ-4 + ), and the Dimensional Assessment of Personality Pathology-Basic Questionnaire (DAPP-BQ) – were administered to 960 outpatients and their scales factor-analyzed following a bass ackwards approach. The resulting hierarchical structure was interpretable and replicable across gender and methods up to seven factors. This structure highlights coincidences among current dimensional models and clarifies their apparent divergences, and thus helps to delineate the unified taxonomy of normal and abnormal personality that the field requires.