Introduction to the special issue on personality and psychopathology.

The goal of this Special Issue is to enhance this reintegration of normal-range personality and abnormal psychology, 30 years after they were split apart. The articles in the Issue examine the topic from a variety of approaches, but each of them addresses the central problem of how normal-range individual differences are related to abnormal behavior. Seven of these articles examine personality in relation to specific types of psychopathology: personality disorders, alcoholism and antisocial personality, mood and anxiety disorders, dissociative disorders, somatoform disorders, eating disorders, and schizophrenia. It is impossible to summarize the wealth of findings that are contained in these articles; each deserves to be examined carefully. However, we can note some general conclusions here. First, it is abundantly clear that personality traits and psychopathological disorders are, in fact, empirically related. Second, although the observed relations tend to be orderly and psychologically meaningful, they also are relatively nonspecific. That is, one does not see a one-to-one correspondence between a given trait and a specific disorder; rather, each of the extensively studied traits is associated with several diagnostic categories. Third, due to a paucity of relevant data, the nature of these observed relations is still largely unclear. Several different explanatory models have been proposed, and each has received at least suggestive support in the literature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)