Academic achievement has too often been a metric by which students define their self-worth. For some students, this focus manifests itself through perfectionism, attaining high grades, and overvaluing extrinsic learning rewards. Students who consider their self-worth to be contingent upon their academic performance often suffer from withdrawal,…

Objectives: Current research suggests that effective psychotherapies for Self Injurious Behavior (SIB) in the context of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) contain generic common elements which are responsible for their success. Because of the links between BPD, SIB, and child abuse, it is likely that these common elements can also be applied…

The Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure (SWAP) is a personality assessment instrument designed for use by expert clinical assessors. Critics have raised questions about its psychometrics, most notably its validity across observers and situations, the impact of its fixed score distribution on research findings, and its test-retest reliability. We…

Today’s young generation (often called "Millennials," "GenY," or "Generation Me") are the first to grow up with the Internet and social networking websites. Have these experiences led to more and better social connections, or fewer and atrophied ones? Social media use may lead to online political action such as signing an e-mail petition but does…

Theoretical and empirical research has linked poor emotion regulation abilities with dysfunctional frontolimbic circuitry. Consistent with this, research on borderline personality disorder (BPD) finds that frontolimbic dysfunction is a predominant neural substrate underlying the disorder. Emotion regulation is profoundly compromised in BPD.…

Lynam and colleagues recently developed a new self-report inventory for the assessment of psychopathy, the Elemental Psychopathy Assessment (EPA). Using a sample of undergraduates (N = 227), the authors examined the construct validity of the EPA by examining its correlations with self and stranger ratings on the Five-Factor Model, as well as…

Objective: This study assessed a Web-based cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for maladaptive perfectionism, investigating perfectionism, anxiety, depression, negative automatic thoughts, and perceived stress. Participants: Participants were undergraduate students defined as maladaptive perfectionists through a screening questionnaire at an urban…

The development of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; R. D. Hare, 2003) has fueled intense clinical interest in the construct of psychopathy. Unfortunately, a side effect of this interest has been conceptual confusion and, in particular, the conflating of measures with constructs. Indeed, the field is in danger of equating the PCL-R with…

This study evaluates the validity of derived measures of the psychopathic personality traits of Fearless Dominance and Impulsive Antisociality from the NEO Personality Inventory-Revised (NEO-PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992) using data from the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study (baseline N = 733). These 3 issues were examined:…

The present study examines the moderating role first grade classroom quality may have on the relations between children's difficult temperament (assessed in infancy) and their academic and social outcomes in early elementary school (first grade). Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Study of Early Child…

Externalising behaviours such as substance misuse (SM) and conduct disorder (CD) symptoms highly co-ocurr in adolescence. While disinhibited personality traits have been consistently linked to externalising behaviours there is evidence that these traits may relate differentially to SM and CD. The current study aimed to assess whether this was the…

Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a behavior that is prevalent among children and adolescents. Although NSSI is often associated with borderline personality disorder and depression, it co-occurs with numerous psychiatric symptoms and associated diagnoses. The current article reviews the research addressing psychiatric symptoms that are commonly…

Prevalence rates of behavioral problems in children with motor disabilities are commonly based on questionnaires developed for a general population (e.g., Child Behavior CheckList). These questionnaires do not take into account lower levels of intellectual functioning. The first aim of this study was to examine the prevalence of parent-reported…

This study examined the degree of correspondence between two assessments for narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) in a mixed clinical and community sample--one using a self-report measure (Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire-4) and the other using clinical judgments derived from an assessment based on the longitudinal, expert, all data (LEAD)…

Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) is associated with suicide, violence, and risk-taking behavior and can slow response to first-line treatment for Axis I disorders. ASPD may be assessed infrequently because few efficient diagnostic tools are available. This study evaluated 2 promising self-report measures for assessing ASPD--the ASPD scale of…