Personality traits and personality disorders

The structure of personality disorder traits was examined in a sample of 400 undergraduates who completed the personality disorder questionnaire from the Structured Clinical interview for DSM-III-R (SCID-II). The relations between personality disorder and normal personality traits indexed by the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (EPQ-R) were examined. The three-duster model of personality traits-as described in the DSM scheme-found equivocal support. Exploratory principal components analysis and confirmatory factor analysis found four broad factors of personality disorder that overlapped with normal personality traits: an asthenic factor related to neuroticism; an antisocial factor associated with psychoticism; an asocial factor linked to introversion-extraversion; and an anankastic (obsessive-compulsive) factor. There is growing agreement about the number and type of broad personality disorder dimensions; similar dimensions may be found in clinical and non-clinical samples, suggesting that those people with personality disorders differ quantitatively rather than qualitatively from others; and there is substantial overlap between normal and abnormal personality dimensions.