Introduction to Part Two of the Special Section on the Research Agenda for the Development of a Dimensional Classification of Personality Disorder

Abstract

The American Psychiatric Association (APA), the World Health Organization, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse are sponsoring a series of ten international conferences to develop recommendations for research that will be of most use to the authors of the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–V). The first conference, “Dimensional Models of Personality Disorder: Etiology, Pathology, Phenomenology, & Treatment,” was held at the APA headquarters in Arlington, VA on December 1–3, 2004. The prior issue of the Journal of Personality Disorders (JPD) published abbreviated versions of articles presented at this conference. The current volume of JPD provides the remainder of this special journal series, more specifically, the abbreviated versions of the conference presentations by Drs. Juri Allik (“Personality Dimensions across Cultures”), Robert F. Krueger (“Continuity of Axes I and II: Toward a Unified Model of Personality, Personality Disorders, and Clinical Disorders”), Timothy J. Trull (“Dimensional Models of Personality Disorder: Coverage and Cutoffs”), and Roel Verheul (“Clinical Utility of Dimensional Models for Personality Pathology”), along with two discussant papers by Drs. Michael Ashton (“The Lexical Approach to the Study of Personality Structure: Toward the Identification of Cross–Culturally Replicable Dimensions of Personality Variation”) and Peter Tyrer (“The Problem of Severity in the Classification of Personality Disorder”) that were invited by Dr. John Livesley, the Editor of JPD. This special series ends with the overview article by Drs. Widiger, Simonsen, Krueger, Livesley, and Verheul (“Personality Disorder Research Agenda for the DSM–V”). Further details regarding the conference and the APA research agenda for the DSM–V are provided in the prior special issue of JPD. Journal of Personality Disorders, 19(3), 211, 2005 © 2005 The Guilford Press