Integrating and distinguishing personality and psychopathology.

OBJECTIVE

We asked authors of this Special Issue to answer the following four questions: (1) Is there evidence that personality and psychopathology can be integrated? (2) Is integration important? (3) Can they be distinguished? and (4) How can the difference be measured?

METHOD: We review each of the papers and place the special issue in a historical context.

RESULTS

Authors uniformly agreed that personality and psychopathology can be integrated within a common structure and that this is important. The third and fourth questions were more challenging. Though authors generally agreed that there is a distinction between the person and their mental health problems, articulations of that distinction were fuzzy and it is clear that current methods cannot adequately delineate these domains.

CONCLUSIONS

We summarize the issue by offering five directions for future research: (1) develop measurement tools that distinguish between the person, the context, and their transaction, (2) measure behavior and context at multiple timescales, (3) distinguish behavior and dysfunction in measurement, (4) use multimethod data to tap different levels of behavior, and (5) examine person-specific processes. Each of these directions comes with challenges, but the payoff of resolving them will be a more principled, evidence-based, and clinically useful model for the distinction between personality and psychopathology.