Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, Vol 17(3), May 2026, 220-229; doi:10.1037/per0000770
Aggressiveness is a core feature of many personality disorders. Dozens of dispositional aggressiveness scales exist with their own idiosyncratic factor structures, but they can be distilled down into six factors: relational, angry, violent, retaliatory, intimate, and alcohol. Yet it remains unknown how this comprehensive factor structure might change or remain stable at relatively high levels of aggressiveness—knowledge with considerable relevance to the study of personality pathology. To examine this, I used factor mixture modeling on self-report data from 1,447 diverse undergraduates from a Minority Serving Institution, which combined the person-centered and variable-centered approaches of profile and factor analyses. Analyses revealed three latent profiles that were initially characterized by high (∼14% of sample), medium (∼41%), or low (∼45%) levels of all six aggressiveness factors. Looking at the profile-specific factor solutions, five of the six original factors reemerged with considerable similarity across profiles. These factors’ profile-specific configurations and correlations portrayed a shift, in which more aggressive profiles were characterized less by angry tendencies toward retaliation and more by their antagonistic traits. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)