Uncovering the structure of antagonism.

Abstract

Despite the advances in our understanding of the structure of personality and psychopathology (see Kotov et al., 2017), less attention has been paid to empirically examining their underlying facet structure. To gain a more nuanced understanding of the structure of personality, it is important to identify empirically derived lower order structures of these trait domains; thus, the present study sought to examine the structure of antagonism as represented by items from commonly used measures of pathological personality traits. Participants were recruited from a large, southeastern university (N = 532) and completed 234 antagonism items selected from seven measures of pathological personality traits. Criterion variables measuring interpersonal adjectives, aggression, substance use, depression, and anxiety were also collected. A series of factor analyses were conducted to examine the structure of antagonism at a range of specificities. A seven-factor solution emerged as being both comprehensive and reasonably parsimonious with factors labeled Callousness, Grandiosity, Domineering, Manipulation, Suspiciousness, Aggression, and Risk Taking. The present findings demonstrate how trait Antagonism unfolds at varying levels of specificity as well as how the emergent factors differentially relate to outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).