Buss and Craik (1987) have outlined a conceptual framework and a set of methods for examining the correspondence between clinician's implicit conceptions of personality disorder (PD) and nonclinicians' implicit conceptions of everyday personality. We used these methods to develop three sets of behavioral descriptors, exemplifying personality dispositions pertinent to the obsessive-compulsive, paranoid, and histrionic PDs. A sample of clinical psychologists was asked to rate these descriptors on prototypicality for the PDs and a sample of non-clinicians was asked to rate these descriptors on prototypicality for the everyday dispositions from which the original sets of descriptors were derived. Behavioral descriptors prototypical of perfectionistic, methodical, and serious were prototypical of obsessive-compulsive PD. Descriptors prototypical of mistrustful, suspicious, and oversensitive were prototypical of paranoid PD; and descriptors prototypical of self-dramatizing and vain were prototypical of histrion...