ABSTRACT
Personality disorders (PDs) are one of the major problems for the organization of public health systems. Deepening the link between personality traits and psychopathological drifts, it seems increasingly essential for the often dramatic repercussions that PDs have on social contexts. Some of these disorders, such as borderline PD, antisocial PD, in their most tragic expression, are the basis of problems related to crime, sexual violence, abuse, and mistreatment of minors. Many authors propose a dimensional classification of personality pathology, which has received empirical support from numerous studies over the last 20 years based on more robust theoretical principles than those applied to current nosography. The present study investigates the nature of the research carried out in the last years on the personality in the clinical field exploring the contents of current research on personality relapses, evaluating, on the one hand, the emerging areas of greatest interest and others, those that they stopped generating sufficient motivations in scholars. This study evaluates text patterns regarding how the terms "personality" and "mental health" are used in titles and abstracts published in PubMed in the last 5 years. We use a topic analysis: Latent Dirichlet Allocation that expresses every report as a probabilistic distribution of latent topics that are represented as a probabilistic distribution of words. A total of 7,572 abstracts (from 2012 to 2017) were retrieved from PubMed for the query on "mental health" and "personality." The study found 30 topics organized in eight hierarchical clusters that describe the type of current research carried out on personality and its clinical relapse. The hierarchical clusters latent themes were the following: social dimensions, clinical aspects, biological issues, clinical history of PD, internalization and externalization symptoms, impulsive behaviors, comorbidities, criminal behaviors. The results indicate that the concept of personality is associated with a wide range of conditions. The study of personality and mental health still proceeds, mainly, according to a practical-clinical approach; too little moves, however, according to an innovative research approach, but the work shows the common commitment of scholars to a new way of dealing with the study of personality.
ABSTRACT
Cloninger's Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) although elaborated on the general population, is frequently used in clinical samples. The study evaluates the psychometric characteristics of TCI in clinical populations with the aim of creating a reduced version of the test suitable for these subjects. This research was conducted on two groups of mental health outpatients. In the first study, 44 items, correlated with the psychiatric disorders, was selected. These items, divided in four dimensions utilizing both statistic and psychopathological criteria, show good internal consistency and external validity and constitute a Reduced Version (TR-TCI) of the test. In the second study, the predictive validity of the TR-TCI was evaluated through the ROC curves and a logistic regression model. The results show a good predictive validity of TR-TCI, that allows us to use this instrument in order to identify the personality structures that make people sensitive to psychiatric pathologies.
ABSTRACT
Borderline Personality Disorder is a serious mental disease, classified in Cluster B of DSM IV-TR personality disorders. People with this syndrome presents an anamnesis of traumatic experiences and shows dissociative symptoms. Since not all subjects who have been victims of trauma develop a Borderline Personality Disorder, the emergence of this serious disease seems to have the fragility of character as a predisposing condition. Infect, numerous studies show that subjects positive for diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder had scores extremely high or extremely low to some temperamental dimensions (harm Avoidance and reward dependence) and character dimensions (cooperativeness and self directedness). In a sample of 602 subjects, who have had consecutive access to an Outpatient Mental Health Service, it was evaluated the presence of Borderline Personality Disorder using the semi-structured interview for the DSM IV-TR personality disorders. In this population we assessed the presence of dissociative symptoms with the Dissociative Experiences Scale and the personality traits with the Temperament and Character Inventory developed by Cloninger. To assess the weight and the predictive value of these psychopathological dimensions in relation to the Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis, a neural network statistical model called "multilayer perceptron," was implemented. This model was developed with a dichotomous dependent variable, consisting in the presence or absence of the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and with five covariates. The first one is the taxonomic subscale of dissociative experience scale, the others are temperamental and characterial traits: Novelty-Seeking, Harm-Avoidance, Self-Directedness and Cooperativeness. The statistical model, that results satisfactory, showed a significance capacity (89%) to predict the presence of borderline personality disorder. Furthermore, the dissociative symptoms seem to have a greater influence than the character traits in the borderline personality disorder e disease. In conclusion, the results seem to indicate that to borderline personality disorder development, contribute both psychic factors, such as temperament and character traits, and environmental factors, such as traumatic events capable of producing dissociative symptoms. These factors interact in a nonlinear way in producing maladaptive behaviors typical of this disorder.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Although different personality traits have often been associated with different levels of mental activity and cognitive functioning, no previous studies have evaluated the association in a sample that mirrors a nationally-representative sample of elderly individuals. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the association between personality traits and neurocognitive functioning among individuals 51 years and older using the Cognition and Aging in the USA (CogUSA) database. METHODS: We analyzed the association between personality traits and neurocognitive scores derived from Waves I and II of the study. Neurocognitive functions were modeled as an outcome variable using the Big Five Personality Traits as predictors. RESULTS: All personality traits were associated with higher education except Conscientiousness. Older age was associated with higher levels of the Agreeableness and Openness traits. Extraversion, Conscientiousness and Openness were positively associated with increased neurocognitive function and self-rated present memory. Extraversion and Openness also had a positive association with long-term retrieval. Agreeableness was negatively associated with several neurocognitive functions, while Neuroticism was negatively associated with memory and cognitive effort. CONCLUSION: Extraversion, Conscientiousness and Openness personality traits are associated with good cognitive health. Individuals scoring high in Neuroticism and Agreeableness might benefit from tailored cognitive interventions to prevent age-related cognitive decline.
