Abstract
Emotional schemas—cognitive frameworks that organize and guide beliefs, values, interpretations of, and reactions to emotions and emotional experiences—appear to underlie many clinically-relevant constructs, including self-validation, emotion and behavior regulation, and psychopathology. Although growing research suggests emotional schemas may also be related to personality disorders, this research is often fragmented by idiosyncratic conceptualizations of emotional schemas and under-evaluation of cluster A and cluster C personality disorders. The current study contributed to this growing literature by exploring associations between emotional schemas and personality disorder symptoms in a large sample of 1125 individuals seeking outpatient mental health care. Results suggested endorsement of maladaptive emotional schemas were generally associated with greater symptom severity for most personality disorders, and patterns of emotional schema endorsement were generally consistent with personality disorder clinical presentations. However, narcissistic, histrionic, and obsessive–compulsive personality disorders were characterized by under-endorsement of common maladaptive emotional schemas. Further, whereas some emotional schemas appeared pervasive across personality disorders (i.e., invalidation, incomprehensibility), others were closely associated with only one or a few personality disorders (e.g., only individuals with schizoid personality disorder showed exaggerated endorsement of low expression schemas). Results broadly attest to the potential importance of emotional schemas as underlying clinical presentations of personality disorders.