Structural models of psychopathology and its relation to personality across the lifespan

Personality traits emerge early in life and appear to reflect liability for various forms of psychopathology. At the same time, the nature and specificity of these associations remains unclear. I will present data establishing rapprochement between contemporary models of personality and psychopathology, integrating empirically based, hierarchically organized structural representations of both at phenotypic and etiologic levels. This work emphasizes the utility of broad higher-order factors (or spectra) of psychopathology (i.e., internalizing, externalizing), but not necessarily the p-factor or individual diagnostic entities, as valuable foci for targeting transdiagnostic mechanisms undergirding psychopathology.