Publication date: August 2019
Source: Journal of Research in Personality, Volume 81
Author(s): Yuliya Kotelnikova, Carrie A. Weaver, Lee Anna Clark
Abstract
We examined the joint structure of symptoms/syndromes of psychopathology (MMPI-2 Restructured-Clinical Scales; MMPI-2-RC; Tellegen et al., 2003) and maladaptive personality traits (Schedule for Nonadaptive and Adaptive Personality; SNAP-2; Clark, Simms, Wu, & Casillas, 2014) via a series of top-down factor analyses—Goldberg (2006) “bass-ackwards approach”—in a sample of 419 mental-health outpatients and 567 military veterans. A three-factor solution consisting of Negative Affectivity (including Oddity), Low Positive Affectivity, and Disinhibition-versus-Constraint best represented the joint symptom-trait structure, consistent with the third level of Markon et al. (2005) joint hierarchical structure of normal and maladaptive personality traits. Our results point to robustness of the structure of adaptive and maladaptive personality traits and symptoms of psychopathology at the three-factor level.