Categories › Mental illness & personality pathology
Category
Mental illness & personality pathology
Dimensional models, cross-context persistence, interpersonal functioning, transdiagnostic structure, and competing causal descriptions.
Terms
Dimensional psychopathologyThe view that many psychological symptoms and dysfunctions vary continuously rather than existing only as discrete categories.
HiTOPA hierarchical empirical taxonomy that organizes psychopathology into dimensions and spectra rather than relying only on conventional diagnostic categories.
p factorA statistical factor proposed to capture covariance across multiple forms of psychopathology; its substantive interpretation remains debated.
Internalizing / externalizing spectraBroad covariance groupings often used to organize patterns such as inwardly directed distress and outwardly directed dysregulation.
Transdiagnostic mechanismA mechanism or process that appears across multiple nominally different diagnoses.
ComorbidityCo-occurrence of multiple diagnoses or symptom clusters within the same person or across time.
Heterotypic continuityPersistence of an underlying vulnerability while its observable symptom expression changes across development.
Interpersonal circumplexA framework organizing interpersonal behavior principally along agency/dominance and communion/affiliation dimensions.
Interpersonal dysfunctionPersistent difficulty in relationships and social functioning treated as a central dimension of some forms of personality pathology.
Self-functioning versus interpersonal functioningA distinction between identity/self-direction problems and empathy/intimacy or relational problems.
Maladaptive personality traitsDimensional personality characteristics that become associated with impairment, rigidity, or recurrent dysfunction.
Trait severity versus trait styleThe distinction between how impaired a person is and the particular dispositional pattern through which impairment is expressed.
Network theory of psychopathologyAn approach that models symptoms as interacting elements rather than treating them only as interchangeable indicators of a single latent disease.
Bridge symptomIn symptom-network models, a symptom proposed to connect otherwise distinct clusters and potentially transmit activation between them.
Ego-syntonic versus ego-dystonicWhether a thought, trait, or behavior feels consistent with the self versus experienced as intrusive, alien, or unwanted.
State-dependent assessmentDistortion of assessment by temporary conditions such as acute mood, sleep loss, intoxication, withdrawal, or crisis.
Diagnostic overshadowingA tendency to attribute new symptoms to an existing diagnosis without adequately testing alternative explanations.
Research trail
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