Cloudfindings

General Psychopathology Masks the Associations Between Psychiatric Disorders and Personality Traits Many studies have tried to link mental disorders to normal personality structure, however findings are often inconsistent, or do not clearly show associations with personality traits. I hypothesize that these inconsistencies are for two reasons, the first being that general psychopathology, a latent factor which all mental disorders are found to load onto, is partially masking these associations, and the second being that most studies use correlations to investigate these associations instead of factor analysis. In this paper I demonstrate that several mental disorders map clearly onto the big five via factor analysis when controlling for general psychopathology. Before controlling for general psychopathology, nearly all disorders loaded highly on neuroticism. When controlling for general psychopathology, autism maps onto low openness (particularly the social/imagination domain), and hig...