Abstract
The tripartite model (Clark and Watson, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 100(3), 316–336 1991) was developed to explain both the strong comorbidity and the distinction between anxiety and depression. The model includes a shared general distress factor that is most strongly associated with Neuroticism/Negative Emotionality (N/NE); a unique depression factor, anhedonia, which is most strongly associated with low Positive Emotionality/Extraversion; and anxious arousal, a unique anxiety factor that subsequent research has shown to be most strongly related to panic/agoraphobia among the anxiety disorders (e.g., Mineka et al. Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 377–412 1998) and to have the weakest link to personality. The present study extends past work by demonstrating that narrower facets of personality domains show nuanced relations that are masked when only the broader domains are examined. Specifically, we investigated facet-level relations of the tripartite model’s symptom dimensions using three hierarchical personality measures (BFI-2, NEO-PI-3, and FI-FFM) and data from three separate samples (Ns = 353–451). In one sample, the tripartite-model dimensions were assessed twice across a 9.5-month interval. At the domain level, N/NE, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness were the strongest predictors of these factors. At the facet level, general distress and anhedonia were most strongly related to N/NE’s Depression facet; anhedonia also was substantially linked to the low Energy/Positive Temperament component of Extraversion. Finally, anxious arousal was best predicted by the Somatic Complaints facet of N/NE. This pattern of results was highly stable across measures, samples, and time points. Theoretical implications of the findings are discussed, including connecting these findings to the dimensional Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology framework.
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Notes
Prior research using this dataset has explicated relations between various personality factors (including Extraversion and emotion regulation) and a broad range of psychopathology (e.g., Stanton, Rozek, Stasik-O’Brien, Ellickson-Larew, & Watson, 2016; Stanton, Stasik-O’Brien, Ellickson-Larew, & Watson, 2016b; Watson et al. 2015), but none have explored the personality relations of the tripartite constructs.
This dataset was used for an earlier review (Watson et al. 2017) of self-report indicators of negative valence constructs within the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC).
As we had used Spearman correlations to calculate bivariate analyses, we ranked the raw data before conducting multiple regressions.
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Khoo, S., Stanton, K., Clark, L.A. et al. Facet-Level Personality Relations of the Symptom Dimensions of the Tripartite Model. J Psychopathol Behav Assess 42, 160–177 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-019-09763-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-019-09763-w