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In literature, the development of the dark personality is associated with the experience of childhood trauma in combination with genetic disposition and environmental factors. In previous studies, we have developed and validated the SST for antisocial cognitions, a task that is able to capture cognitions in the range of antisocial and prosocial schemas. In this study, we therefore want to investigate whether the SST and the choice of antisocial schemas are also related to experienced trauma, as assumed in the literature.

Healthy individuals show a tendency towards positive cognitions that is reversed during depression. This tendency is revealed by the Scrambled Sentences Task (SST), an experimental procedure that was also shown to be associated with vulnerability to suffer from depressive episodes. Here, we used the SST to map the prevalence of negative cognitions across the personality domains of criterion B of the Alternative Model of Personality Disorder (AMPD) of the DSM-5 in healthy individuals. The AMPD was developed to characterize personality in a dimensional approach spanning both healthy and pathological individuals. We expected negative cognitions to be more frequent among individuals with high negative affectivity and detachment scores, as these dimensions are thought to be associated with disorders of affect. This association was stable and significant in three separate experiments and persisted for detachment after adjusting for current depression levels. In the Five-Factor Model of Personality (FFM), in contrast, only openness failed to show any association with negative cognitions. Negative affectivity and detachment differed in the preferential association with negative and positive cognitions, respectively. This finding suggests a possible role of motivational factors related to sensitivity to negative and positive incentives in linking personality dimensions and cognitive tendencies, with an anhedonic dimension of negative cognitions being present alongside current depressive symptoms.

Background: Physicians, especially psychiatrists, have a high risk of job-related stress, and mental impairment. In our study we examined changes in private and occupational stress factors and mental health within a decade. The legislative reduction of physicians' working hours in Germany during this period made it possible to investigate the impact of working hours in particular. Methods: Questionnaires were administered at two psychiatrist meetings (2006 and 2016) about job and family situation, depressiveness, burnout and effort-reward imbalance. A total of N = 1,797 datasets were analyzed. Results: Working hours and free weekends were associated with mental health indices. Correlation analyses showed that a reduction in weekly working hours and working days at weekends was related to reduced scores for effort-reward-imbalance, burnout and depression. Conclusions: Our data show changes in workplace stress and mental health in psychiatrists in a decade in which a reduction in working hours has been required by law. These results can provide indications of effective prevention strategies in the professional context of physicians working in psychiatry., publishedVersion