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The introduction of the alternative model of personality disorders in the fifth edition of the

Climate change is a serious threat. Personality psychologists can help address this threat by understanding what kind of people tend to endorse proenvironmental attitudes and engage in sustainable behavior. Previous research supports reliable associations between proenvironmental attitudes and personality traits. However, this research has generally aggregated different kinds of attitudes into a single composite and has focused on the domain level of personality traits.This study explored how 10 lower-order aspects of the Big Five personality traits were related to eight different proenvironmental attitudes in three convenience samples from the United States (N = 1234; 1000) and the United Kingdom (N = 538).All five trait domains were related to at least one proenvironmental attitude across all three samples. Seven of eight proenvironmental attitudes could be predicted by one or more traits in all three samples. We also found evidence that the Openness aspect of Openness to Experience was a more consistent predictor of proenvironmental attitudes than the Intellect aspect. In contrast, there was little benefit in distinguishing between the aspects of other trait domains. We did not find evidence that age or political orientation moderated the associations between proenvironmental attitudes and personality.Results point to the need for more fine-grained research on individual differences in proenvironmental attitudes and behavior.

The Treatment Utility of Clinical Assessment (TUCA) has long been a controversial topic, with arguably more (strong) opinions than relevant, well-designed empirical research. We argue that this question has been tackled too broadly and that a more contextualized approach would likely be more informative. Instead of asking "what is the treatment utility of assessment," we suggest specifying and examining more closely the conditions by which assessment can-or cannot-contribute to treatment process and ultimately patient benefit. To this end, we present a heuristic model for conceptualizing the conditions under which clinical assessment may have treatment utility and illustrate its use by distinguishing four specific classes of assessment-driven interventions. We distinguish direct benefits from assessment from indirect TUCA as two principal pathways, emphasize the importance of having some a priori theory regarding working mechanisms, and stress the requirements of ensuring adequate variability of the presumed mediating variables. These considerations in turn argue for a broader view of pertinent outcome measures, the use of more powerful designs in TUCA research, and the implementation of some form of stepped assessment in clinical practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

A hypermentalizing impairment, or tendency to overattribute mental states to others, has been identified among individuals with borderline personality disorder. However, associations between hypermentalizing and other disorders call into question the specificity of this impairment to borderline personality disorder. This study aimed to evaluate the relative strength of the association between hypermentalizing and borderline personality disorder compared with other disorders and to assess the impact of moderators on the relationship between hypermentalizing and psychopathology.The authors conducted a meta-analysis of 36 studies (N=4,188 people) to investigate the relative strength of the association between hypermentalizing and borderline personality disorder, compared with other disorders, and to assess the impact of moderators on this relationship. The Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition, an ecologically valid experimental instrument, was used to measure hypermentalizing.Results indicated support for an association between psychopathology and hypermentalizing (r=0.24, 95% confidence interval [CI]=0.17 to 0.31), but the association was not significantly stronger for borderline personality disorder (r=0.26, 95% CI=0.12 to 0.39) than for other disorders (r=0.24, 95% CI=0.14 to 0.33). Neither age nor gender significantly moderated the association between psychopathology and hypermentalizing.Hypermentalizing may be related to psychopathology in general rather than borderline personality disorder in particular. The findings are discussed in view of the possibility that features of borderline personality disorder associated with other psychopathology may explain the overall association between psychopathology and hypermentalizing. Clinical implications for mentalization-based treatment and concerns that the measurement used for hypermentalization may be too narrow and not representative of variations in functioning across cultures and race-ethnicity also are discussed.

The authors asked 361 personality disorder experts to rank order their preferences for a categorical, dimensional, or mixed/hybrid approach to personality disorder diagnosis in manuals such as the DSM and ICD. Respondents reported a general preference for the mixed/hybrid approach over a purely dimensional approach, and a clear preference against a categorical model. Although there were some statistically significant differences in the rates across training background, age, and gender, this overall pattern of preferences held across these factors. Preferences were notably similar to those reported by Bernstein et al. (2007) prior to the beginnings of deliberations on DSM-5 that ultimately led to a hybrid model. Results are informative for discussions regarding how to classify personality disorders in diagnostic manuals.

© 2018 Taylor & Francis In this study we examined the structure, reliability, and validity of the Levels of Personality Functioning Scale–Self Report (LPFS–SR) in 3 large community samples. The LPFS–SR is a questionnaire with content that corresponds directly to the DSM–5 alternative model of personality disorders, Criterion A. We found that the LPFS–SR was highly reliable across a brief retest interval. LPFS–SR scores correlated substantially with a wide range of maladaptive personality traits, personality disorder constructs, and interpersonal problems. The LPFS–SR did not correlate as strongly with aspects of personality with less clear relations to distress and dysfunction. Data further support that identity, self-direction, intimacy, and empathy components of the LPFS–SR can be characterized by a single factor and have similar correlations with criterion variables, consistent with the hypothesis that DSM–5 Criterion A is a relatively homogeneous construct. Overall, these results support the validity of the LPFS–SR, highlight important issues in assessing personality pathology, and point toward novel avenues for research on personality disorder classification.

© 2018 European Association of Personality Psychology Clinical and basic personality psychologists interact less than they should, given their similar interests. In clinical personality psychology, available evidence supports a transition from the current categorical system to a hierarchical trait scheme for diagnosing the stable features of personality disorder. However, trait models do not capture the dynamic aspects of personality disorders as they have been described in the clinical literature, and thus miss a clinically critical feature of personality pathology. In contrast, basic personality psychologists have coalesced around a consensual structure of individual differences and become increasingly interested in the dynamic processes that underlie and contextualize traits. But trait psychology models are not sufficiently specific to characterize dynamic personality processes. In this paper, I filter clinical descriptions of personality disorders through the lens of interpersonal theory to specify a recursive within-situation interpersonal pattern of motives, affects, behaviours, and perceptions that could contribute to the stable between-situation patterns of maladaptive behaviour of historical interest to both basic and clinical personality psychologists. I suggest that this interpersonal model adds specificity to recent proposals regarding processes in the basic personality literature and has significant potential to advance research on personality dynamics. © 2018 European Association of Personality Psychology.

The Society for Personality Assessment offers a large tent within which basic scientists, educators, and applied practitioners should all feel welcome. This diversity is also an essential feature o...

The focus of this paper is on the termination of clinical supervision. Although clinical supervision is considered the backbone of most mental health training programs, it gets relatively little theoretical or empirical attention. The termination of supervision has received even less attention. In this paper, we describe an approach to terminating supervision in our treatment team, which integrates intensive assessment with a relational perspective in a clinical science training program (LevendoskyHopwood, 2016). We describe our established conceptual framework, review empirical evidence, and provide verbatim examples from final supervision meetings on our team to elaborate the importance of conceptualizing individual differences across trainees and parallels between supervision and psychotherapy dynamics. We conclude by emphasizing the need for research on supervision in general and supervision termination in particular. (PsycINFO Database Record

A growing body of research supports the validity of the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5) in evaluating community and psychiatric samples. Although maladaptive personality also has significant relevance in primary care settings, research on the PID-5 in primary care samples is limited. In this study, the authors examined the intercorrelations, convergent validity, and discriminant validity of the brief form of the PID-5 (PID-5-BF) in 100 primary care outpatients. Results are consistent with findings in other samples in suggesting that PID-5 domains are moderately intercorrelated and associated with a variety of mental health variables. Smaller associations with physical health variables support the discriminant validity of the instrument. Overall, results suggest that the PID-5-BF can provide a useful psychiatric screening tool in primary care settings.

ObjectiveExtensive evidence supports the association between Five-Factor Model (FFM) traits involving high neuroticism, low agreeableness and low conscientiousness and borderline personality disorder (BPD) characteristics, particularly among adults in community samples. However, studies supporting this link in adolescent samples are relatively limited, and few studies have examined the links between FFM traits and specific dimensions of BPD, such as those distinguished by the Revised Diagnostic Interview for Borderlines (DIB-R). In this study, we examined associations between FFM traits and BPD characteristics in a group of clinical and non-clinical adolescents.MethodWe evaluated the correlations between the FFM personality traits, as measured by the NEO-Five-Factor Inventory and BPD characteristics as measured by the DIB-R in a sample of adolescents (N = 162).ResultsConsistent with previous research, BPD dimensions were highly associated with high neuroticism, low conscientiousness, low agreeableness and to a somewhat lesser extent with low extraversion. Specificity of associations between FFM traits and DIB-R section scores was limited, in part because of strong intercorrelations among DIB-R scores.DiscussionThese results imply that evidence about trait-BPD associations in adult samples generalizes well to adolescents. Clinical implications of these findings are discussed.

Passive-aggressive personality disorder (PAPD) has historically played an important role in clinical theorizing and was diagnosable prior to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed. [DSM-IV]; American Psychiatric Association, 1994), in which the construct was relabeled negativistic (NEGPD), expanded to include negative affective symptoms, and appendicized. In this study we tested the hypothesis that the expansion of PAPD to include content related to negative moods and nonspecific personality pathology compromised its discriminant validity. In an undergraduate sample (N = 1,215), a self-report measure of PAPD was only moderately related to NEGPD and showed less diagnostic overlap with other personality disorders than NEGPD. Furthermore, a conjoint factor analysis yielded a strong first factor (moodiness) that appeared less specific to passive-aggressive behavior than 3 other factors (irresponsibility, inadequacy, and contempt). We conclude that future research on this potentially important clinical construct should focus on core passive-aggressive features and abandon the negativistic content that has been added to it in successive editions of the DSM.

© 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Objective: Theory and research have emphasized the impact of life events on personality trait change. In this article, we review prospective research on personality trait change in response to nine major life events in the broader domains of love and work. Method: We expected to find that life events lead to personality trait change to the extent that they have a lasting influence on individuals' thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Moreover, we predicted that love-related life events such as marriage or parenthood would be more strongly related to changes in traits that emphasize affective content, whereas work-related life events would be more likely to lead to change in traits that reflect behavioral or cognitive content. Results: The current state of research provided some evidence that life events can lead to changes in personality traits and that different life events may be differently related to specific trait domains. Conclusions: A more general conclusion emerging from this review is that the evidence for the nature, shape, and timing of personality trait change in response to life events is still preliminary. We discuss the implications of the results for theory and research and provide directions for future studies on life events and personality trait change.

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd In this paper, we review recent findings related to stability and change in personality and personality disorder. Estimates of stability vary depending on a number of methodological and substantive factors. These factors include the type of stability being examined, the type of construct being assessed, the method being used to assess personality, how participants are sampled, and developmental trends in personality stability and change. We describe current evidence about personality stability with respect to each of these factors. We conclude that current gaps in the literature can be filled by more carefully attending to factors that impact estimates of stability and change, and provide recommendations about how future research can fill those gaps.