Overlap between general factors of psychopathology and personality: They share associations with daily life functioning and communication style

Dimitri Van Der Linden,Curtis S Dunkel,Agnes Von Wyl,Misa Yamanaka-Altenstein,Michael P Hengartner,Peter Prinzie

doi:10.1007/s12144-021-02354-7

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that specific personality dimensions, -e.g., the Big Five-, consistently intercorrelate, such that they form a general factor of personality (GFP). It has been hypothesized that the GFP reflects social effectiveness. Similarly, in the clinical domain, overlap between various psychopathological symptoms has also been reported, leading to a general factor of Psychopathology, or p factor. The aim of this study was to test the overlap between the higher-order factors in personality and psychopathology, and how they relate to daily life functioning and communication style. We tested a sample of 165 outpatients of a psychological therapy institute, using a multi-source approach that included self-reports and other ratings. The outpatients’ self-reports of personality, general psychological problems, and interpersonal problems were available. Psychotherapists rated the outpatients’ functioning in daily life with the well-known Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) scale. A spouse or friend also rated the impact of the patient’s communication/social behavior. Patients with lower GFP scores and higher scores on general psychopathology, displayed more distress and daily functioning deficits (i.e., lower GAF scores) and, in terms of communication styles, were also rated as being less dominant, less in control socially, and more submissive and aggressive. We proposed that part of the overlap between the general factors (GFP, psychopathology factors) may relate to a lower general life functioning and less social effectiveness.

Highlights

In the past decade, there has been an upsurge of studies examining the overlap between psychological traits that traditionally have been considered to be largely independent from each other
This, again, confirms the relative invariance of the general factor of personality (GFP) over different statistical techniques (e.g., Van der Linden et al, 2017). It was already clear from the literature that the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) contains a general psychopathology score, which is labelled the global severity index (GSI: Derogatis & Melisaratos, 1983)
In the present study with 165 patients of a psychotherapy clinic, we, first, confirmed the substantial overlap between the general factor in normal range personality dimensions and general factors extracted from the Brief Symptom Inventory and interpersonal problems measures, respectively

Summary

Introduction

There has been an upsurge of studies examining the overlap between psychological traits that traditionally have been considered to be largely independent from each other. It has been acknowledged that many of the psychopathological syndromes such as depression, anxiety, psychosis, thought problems, and antisocial behavior show considerable overlap (Caspi et al, 2014; Lahey et al, 2012). The notion of a general factor in psychopathology has been expanded by assuming that this factor is present in almost all psychopathological symptoms, regardless of the specific instrument used to measure them This shared variance among symptoms is often referred to as the p factor (e.g., Caspi et al, 2014; Selzam et al, 2018; Van Bork et al, 2017)

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Conclusion