Psychopathology and personality are separate areas of psychology, but they aren’t as separate as previously thought. In fact, a new study suggests that the two spheres are closely tied, with around a fourth of people’s risk of mental health conditions, including their risk of depression, anxiety, and phobias, being attributable to their personality traits.
Published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, the study suggests that personality traits can serve as predictors of common mental health conditions — a finding that could change the way we think about psychology while also informing clinical tools and treatments.
Read More: Scientists Once Thought Personality Was Set in Stone. They Were Wrong
The Personality and Psychopathology Connection
For the most part, a person’s personality and psychopathology are set apart in psychology research. The reason for this is partially related to the idea that one is more stable than the other.
“Personality research primarily focuses on adaptive and presumably more stable processes ... while psychopathology research usually addresses nonadaptive and ostensibly more temporary processes,” the new study states. And yet, the two overlap to an extent, though the exact amount of intersection isn’t entirely clear.
To reconsider the relationship of personality and psychopathology research, the study authors consulted survey responses from over 16,000 participants, as well as from their family and friends. The responses provided the researchers with insights into the participants’ personalities and psychopathologies, revealing that personality traits are actually much more connected to the risks of common mental health conditions than prior studies tend to acknowledge.
“Our findings underscore a strong overlap between personality traits and psychopathology,” the researchers report. Indeed, their results revealed that personality traits account for around 25 percent of the differences in people’s overall risk of mental health conditions, and for around 25 percent of the differences in people’s specific risks of specific disorders, from depression to anxiety to phobias.
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Tying Traits to Mental Health Risks
Including self- and informant-reported responses, the surveys that the team analyzed assessed the participants’ personalities according to five factors — their openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism — and also according to a handful of smaller-scale factors, like their tendency to experience embarrassment. The surveys also tested the participants’ psychopathologies, including their risk of common mental health conditions and of specific symptoms, like fear, fatigue, sleeplessness, and inattention.
The results revealed that higher neuroticism — essentially a higher tendency to experience negative emotions — translates into a higher mental health risk. So, too, do higher levels of agreeableness and lower levels of conscientiousness. That means that those who are more moody, more cooperative, less cautious, and less organized are more likely to have mental health conditions than those who aren’t.
Importantly, the researchers stress that their study identifies correlational patterns in personality and psychopathology, rather than causal patterns. Moreover, the results aren’t true in all cases. There are always exceptions to these patterns, meaning that it is still more than possible for mental health conditions to arise in less agreeable, more conscientious people.
“Many people whose traits might statistically predict poor mental health report great well-being,” said Helo Liis Soodla, a study author and a psychologist at the University of Tartu in Estonia, according to a press release. “Conversely, many people who experience mental health problems at some point in their lives do not appear to be at risk based on their personality traits.”
Taken together, the team’s research on personality and psychopathology could contribute to future clinical interventions, though there are many more factors tied to mental health risk that these interventions could consider, too.
“In any given individual, a number of things can affect mental health, from genetic risk variants to stressful childhood events,” Soodla said in the release. “Each factor on its own accounts for only a tiny proportion of the risk of poor mental health.”
Read More: Understanding the “Big Five” Personality Traits
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science. Assessing the Overlap of Personality Traits and Internalizing Psychopathology Using Multi-Informant Data: Two Sides of the Same Coin?
Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
