Personality Dysfunction and Trait Extremity

This chapter discusses the alternative model for personality disorders and its two criteria: impairment/dysfunction and personality disordered traits. Specifically, the chapter explores the distinctiveness between the two criteria. It notes that there is descriptive overlap between them, and it reports on a study examining the degree of empirical overlap. This overlap was reported to be extremely high, with correlations of .76 and .80 for self-report and interview ratings, respectively.