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Explicating the Dispositional Basis of the OCRDs: a Hierarchical Perspective

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Abstract

We examined the dispositional component of the obsessive-compulsive and related disorders (OCRDs) in a large adult sample. Our battery included two hierarchical measures of personality, which allowed us to examine relations with both higher-order domains and lower-order facets of the five-factor model. In addition, our study included multiple indicators of each OCRD, which enabled us to model them as latent factors. Principal factor analyses of these indicators revealed six dimensions: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Hoarding, Excoriation, Body Dissatisfaction, Trichotillomania, and Body Preoccupation. Body Dissatisfaction, OCD, and Hoarding showed the strongest links to personality, with the other symptoms displaying more moderate associations. Neuroticism was the strongest and broadest predictor of the OCRDs at the domain level, exhibiting significant positive relations with every symptom dimension except Body Preoccupation in both bivariate and multivariate analyses. Conscientiousness showed negative associations with Body Dissatisfaction and Hoarding, and was positively related to Body Preoccupation. Finally, openness was negatively linked to OCD at both the bivariate and multivariate level. In comparison to domain-level analyses, the lower-order facets jointly contributed an additional 11.8% (Excoriation) to 17.6% (OCD) of the criterion variance, with a mean increment of 14.2%. Three neuroticism facets—anger, self-consciousness, and impulsiveness—displayed robust positive associations with two or more OCRD symptom factors, but no lower-order trait contributed significantly in every analysis. Overall, our results indicate that—similar to most other forms of psychopathology—OCRD symptoms have a common component of elevated neuroticism.

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Notes

  1. A reviewer raised the issue of whether our results were changed by including the non-clinical participants who answered “no” to all three questions. To examine this issue, we reran our analyses including only those individuals who answered “yes” to at least one question. Our findings essentially were unchanged. Most notably, structural analyses revealed the same basic factors as those shown in Table 1; moreover, these factors correlated very similarly with personality. Consequently, we report results here using data from all participants.

  2. Although the NEO-PI-3 and FI-FFM both contain Modesty scales, they correlated only .42 with one another in this sample; therefore, we did not combine them.

  3. In interpreting regression results, we ignore suppressor effects (Watson et al. 2013) in which novel, unexpected associations emerge at the multivariate level (e.g., significant positive correlations become significant negative regression weights). These suppressor effects were not predicted and are difficult to interpret.

  4. Neuroticism also was significantly related to Body Preoccupation in these analyses (β = .35). Given that neuroticism was unrelated to this OCRD factor at the bivariate level (r = .07; see Table 3), however, the meaning of this finding is unclear.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Lee Anna Clark, Patrick Cruitt, Mark Godding, Haley Heibel, Ana Hernandez, Brittany Katz, Katie Kraemer, Mallory Meter, John Souter, Nadia Suzuki, and Elizabeth Yahiro for their help in the preparation of this manuscript.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, 118 Haggar Hall, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA

    David Watson, Stephanie Ellickson-Larew & Kasey Stanton

  2. Knox College, Galesburg, IL, USA

    Sara M. Stasik-O’Brien

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  1. David Watson
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David Watson, Sara M. Stasik-O'Brien, Stephanie Ellickson-Larew, Kasey Stanton declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in the reported study were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and national research committees and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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All of the research reported here was approved by the University of Notre Dame Institutional Review Board.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in this study.

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Watson, D., Stasik-O’Brien, S.M., Ellickson-Larew, S. et al. Explicating the Dispositional Basis of the OCRDs: a Hierarchical Perspective. J Psychopathol Behav Assess 40, 497–513 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-018-9667-5

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