Abstract
The role of personality trait variation in psychopathology and its influence on the outcome of psychotherapy is a burgeoning field. However, thus far most findings were based on controlled clinical trials that may only poorly represent real-world clinical settings due to highly selective samples mostly restricted to patients with major depression undergoing antidepressive medication. Focusing on personality and psychopathology in a representative naturalistic sample of psychotherapy patients is therefore worthwhile. Moreover, up to date hardly any confirmatory research has been conducted in this field. Strictly confirmatory research implies two major requirements: firstly, specific hypotheses, including expected effect sizes and statistical approaches to data analysis, must be detailed prior to inspection of the data, and secondly, corresponding protocols have to be published online and freely available. Here, we introduce a longitudinal naturalistic study aimed at examining, firstly, the prospective impact of baseline personality traits on the outcome of psychotherapy over a 6-month observation period; secondly, the stability and change in personality traits over time; thirdly, the association between longitudinal change in psychopathology and personality; fourthly, the agreement between self-reports and informant rating of personality; and fifthly, the predictive validity of personality self-reports compared to corresponding informant ratings. For it, we comprehensively state a priori hypotheses, predict the expected effect sizes and detail the statistical analyses that we intend to conduct to test these predictions. Such a stringent confirmatory design increases the transparency and objectivity of psychopathological research, which is necessary to reduce the rate of false-positive findings and to increase the yield of scientific research.
Highlights
The Importance of Personality for PublicMental Health and PsychotherapyThe global burden of disease attributable to mental disorders is tremendous [1], in particular in high-income Western societies, including Europe and the United States of America [2, 3]
Way too often hypotheses are specified after the results are known, and these post hoc analyses are sold as confirmatory research based on a priori hypotheses [127], which substantially undermines the validity of research by inflating the false-positive rate [98]
This study aims at replicating findings from selective randomised controlled trials (RCT) samples in a representative naturalistic sample; it will address some major gaps in the scientific literature
Summary
The Importance of Personality for PublicMental Health and PsychotherapyThe global burden of disease attributable to mental disorders is tremendous [1], in particular in high-income Western societies, including Europe and the United States of America [2, 3]. Comorbid personality disorders, which can be modeled as maladaptive variants of normal personality traits [33,34,35], have shown to significantly reduce the treatment response in patients with mood and anxiety disorders [36,37,38] and to predict long-term functioning deficits and impairments [39,40,41,42] Taken together, these findings stress the importance of personality for public mental health and suggest that psychotherapy, which is the second most common treatment for mental disorders after psychotropic medication in Europe and the United States [43, 44], needs to carefully incorporate personality traits
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