Personality as unidimensional and bidimensional vulnerability: The mediator role of cognitive variables in symptom severity in a sample of people with severe personality disorder

Abstract

The problems of conceptualization of personality disorders (PD) and their adjustment within the rest of pathologies continue to boost a promising research and clinical effort that helps to identify transdiagnostic processes and suggest heuristic interaction models. Understanting personality from the framework of diathesis, we analized the mediating role of a number of variables in symptom severity in a sample of people with severe PD (N = 310). By means of cluster analysis, we found a two-dimension typology that divides exhaustively and exclusively 100% of the participants. Mediation analyses found that personality as a one-dimension continuum has an effect on symptomatic severity mediated by negative automatic thoughts and by cognitive fusion; its effect as a two-dimension typology (internalization and externalization) appears to be mediated only by automatic thoughts. These findings and their implications are discussed in the context of a new paradigm of a process-based clinical science.