Assessment of the Type D personality distress in coronary heart disease patients and healthy subjects in Spain

Abstract

The current study explores the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the personality Distress Scale (DS14) such as structural, convergent, divergent validity and reliability in a large and four samples of 1201 subjects, including coronary heart disease (CHD) patients and healthy subjects. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was performed in a calibration sub-group of 587 subjects, and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in a validation sub-group of 614 subjects. In addition, we carried out an EFA for each group separately. We found two factors corresponded to Negative Affect (NA) and Social Inhibition (SI). Test-retest reliability was 0.77 for NA, 0.82 for SI and 0.83 for DS14. Internal consistency alpha reliability was 0.83 for the DS14 (NA: 0.84 and SI: 0.78). A confirmatory factor analysis showed a robust two-factor structure with satisfactory goodness-of-fit indices (GFI: 0.95, TLI: 0.93, CFI: 0.94 and RMSEA: 0.05). DS14 had a good convergent and divergent validity in relation to depression and anxiety symptoms, and in personality scales such as neuroticism, low socialization and aggression-hostility. A linear multiple regression analysis informed that depression and anxiety symptoms, neuroticism-anxiety, sociability (−), activity (−) and aggression-hostility accounted for 40% and 43% of the DS14 variance for CHD and healthy groups.