Other PDs

Following early work on using the FFM to conceptualize psychopathy, we expanded our work to all DSM IV personality disorders. Our initial efforts involved deriving FFM profiles for each disorder. As with our work the work on psychopathy, we asked experts in each of the PDs (between 25 to 30 for most disorders) to rate prototypic cases of the relevant personality disorder with respect to the thirty facets of the FFM as described by the NEO-PI-R. Ratings were aggregated within disorder to yield a prototypic profile (Lynam & Widiger, 2001) which appear above. In addition to documenting the excellent agreement among experts, we demonstrated how profiles generated in this fashion mapped onto profiles derived by other means, and how profiles made sense of the observed patterns of comorbidity. Several subsequent studies demonstrated that PDs assessed using these profiles appear to work as well as measures explicitly designed to assess the PDs (e.g., Trull et al., 2003; Gudonis et al., 2008). We also developed norms (using North American, French, and Dutch-Flemish sample) to help screen for the PDs using the NEO PI-R (Miller et al., 2008). See below for an excel spreadsheet that will score the NEO PI-R for the PDs accordiing to the normative data.

Similar to our work on psychopathy, concerns were raised as to how well a normal range personality inventory could capture the abnormal range of personality disorder. Thus, FFM-based scales were created for each of the 10 DSM-IV PDs. three of the most widely-used scales are provided below.

Normative data and calculators

Calculator and norm sheet for US sample

Calculator and norm sheet for French sample

Calculator and norm sheet for Dutch-Flemish sample

Download the Five Factor Avoidant PD Assessment (FFAvA)

Download the Five Factor Borderline Inventory (FFBI)

Download the Five Factor Obsessive Compulsive Inventory (FFOCI)