Forms, Importance, and Ineffability of Factor Interactions to Define Personality Disorders

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-1-2019

Publication Title

Journal of Personality Disorders

Volume

33

Issue

5

First page number:

623

Last page number:

632

Abstract

The emergent interpersonal syndrome (EIS) approach conceptualizes personality disorders as the interaction among their constituent traits to predict important criterion variables. We detail the difficulties we have experienced finding such interactive predictors in our empirical work on psychopathy, even when using uncorrelated traits that maximize power. Rather than explaining a large absolute proportion of variance in interpersonal outcomes, EIS interactions might explain small amounts of variance relative to the main effects of each trait. Indeed, these interactions may necessitate samples of almost 1,000 observations for 80% power and a false positive rate of .05. EIS models must describe which specific traits' interactions constitute a particular EIS, as effect sizes appear to diminish as higher-order trait interactions are analyzed. Considering whether EIS interactions are ordinal with non-crossing slopes or disordinal with crossing slopes, or entail nonlinear threshold or saturation effects may help researchers design studies, sampling strategies, and analyses to model their expected effects efficiently.

Keywords

Statistical interaction; Effect size; Nonlinear interaction; Personality trait; Compound trait

Disciplines

Medicine and Health Sciences | Mental Disorders | Psychiatry and Psychology

Language

English

UNLV article access

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