The Alternative DSM-5 Model for Personality Disorders (AMPD) consists of level of personality functioning (Criterion A) and maladaptive personality traits (Criterion B). The brief scale versions of these are understudied, while often being used by clinicians and researchers. In this study, we wanted to investigate the overlap and predictive…

College students may be misdiagnosed as personality disordered when in fact their problems are better explained by their upbringing. Growing up with a personality disordered parent may cause them to initially present with what appear to be personality disordered traits due to issues such as not learning adequate coping skills. Accurate diagnosis…

Background and objectives: Personality disorders are enduring, persistent and pervasive disorders of inner experience and behavior that cause distress or significant impairment in social functioning. They have strong relationship to offending and violence; our aim in the study was to determine the prevalence rate of each specific types of…

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…

Informant reports can provide important information regarding the presence of pathological personality traits, and they can serve as useful supplements to self-report instruments. Ratings from a spouse may be a particularly valuable source of personality assessment because spouses are very well acquainted with the target person, have typically…

Personality disorder is prevalent among offenders with intellectual disabilities (ID), and it is associated with their risk for violence and recurrent offending behaviour. A new staff-rated instrument, the Personality Disorder Characteristics Checklist (PDCC), designed to screen for ICD-10 dissocial and emotionally unstable personality…

Objective: Decisions about the composition of personality assessment in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (5th ed.; DSM-V) will be heavily influenced by the clinical utility of candidate constructs. In this study, we addressed 1 aspect of clinical utility by testing the incremental validity of 5-factor model (FFM)…

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is more often diagnosed in women than in men, and symptoms tend to decline with age. Using a large community sample, the authors investigated whether sex and age differences in four main features of BPD, measured with the "Personality Assessment Inventory-Borderline Features" scale (PAI-BOR; Morey,…

Scott O. Lilienfeld is a professor of psychology at Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Lilienfeld is founder and editor of the journal, "Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice," and is past president of the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology. He has been a member of 11 journal editorial boards, including the…

Traditional self-report measures of psychopathology may be influenced by a variety of recall biases. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) reduces these biases by assessing individuals' experiences as they occur in their natural environments. This study examines the discrepancy between trait questionnaire, retrospective report, and EMA measures of…

This study is the first to demonstrate that features of psychopathy can be reliably and validly detected by lay raters from "thin slices" (i.e., small samples) of behavior. Brief excerpts (5 s, 10 s, and 20 s) from interviews with 96 maximum-security inmates were presented in video or audio form or in both modalities combined. Forty raters used…

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…

This article presents research undertaken with male headteachers in early years schools within the UK and explores several influential discourses in relation to male headteachers' identities. The article discusses the ways in which different identities are constructed for headteachers by parents, governors and wider society, and also how a variety…

The Antisocial Features (ANT) scale of the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) was subjected to taxometric analysis in a group of 2,135 federal prison inmates. Scores on the three ANT subscales--Antisocial Behaviors (ANT-A), Egocentricity (ANT-E), and Stimulus Seeking (ANT-S)--served as indicators in this study and were evaluated using the…

Among the findings were that the clients were able to show greater pathology on the MMPI profiles when they attempted to exaggerate and that the mean malingering profile of the subjects simulates a psychotic pattern not a severe psychoneurosis. Findings were limited in that all subjects were male military personnel. (Author/CG)