Personality vulnerabilities to psychopathology: Exploration of relations between trait structure and social-cognitive processes

Delineating the etiology of psychopathology has traditionally relied on two parallel perspectives in personality: the dispositional trait and social-cognitive approaches. The present research argues that integrating the two parallel approaches is crucial for advancing current understanding on the etiology of a wide range of psychopathological symptoms, including depression, anxiety, and substance use. Three studies demonstrated that meaningful and substantial relations exist between dispositional trait structure and social-cognitive processes.;Study 3 employed a longitudinal experience-sampling methodology to assess social-cognitive vulnerabilities in a more ecologically-valid way. Results indicated that daily affective-cognitive inferences/responses to daily negative events covaried on a within-individuals basis; and that the mean inference/response levels were associated with interindividual differences in Neuroticism. Multilevel mediational analyses suggested that event-related affective-cognitive inferences/responses mediate partially the effects of Neuroticism on daily depressive and anxiety symptoms. Overall, these data provide preliminary evidence for an integrated model of personality-psychopathology relations that emphasizes both the structural and processing aspects of personality vulnerabilities. Implications that arose from this research, including its linkages to research in behavior genetics and developmental psychopathology, are discussed.;Keywords: Personality-psychopathology relations, Trait structure, Social-cognitive vulnerabilities, Psychopathology, Depression, Anxiety, Substance use.;Studies 1 and 2 showed that the various social-cognitive vulnerability variables (i.e., depressogenic inferential style, dysfunctional attitudes, rumination, anxiety sensitivity, intolerance of uncertainty, social-phobic inferential style, poor self-control/regulation) were associated strongly with one another and could be organized into a two-factor model representing general vulnerability factors to internalizing and externalizing psychopathology, respectively. They also revealed common and unique aspects when mapped unto the dispositional structure of the Five-Factor Model. Furthermore, social-cognitive vulnerabilities constituted proximal-specific processes that mediated between distal-broad dispositional vulnerabilities (e.g., Neurotics) and different psychopathological symptom profiles.