Interesting 2001 study on personality types and psychological disorders

[Happy]

I dunno if this is a repost or anything, but I stumbled on this the other day:

http://www.uccs.edu/Documents/dsegal/An-empirical-investigation-Jungs-types-and-PD-features-JPT-2.pdf

The results of the study suggested that people with Introversion, iNtuition, Thinking and Perceiving preferences may be more inclined to certain psychopathological disorders.

With regard to these particular preferences (I'm ignoring the few that don't relate to INTPs), people identified with the following disorders were typed as the following:

• People with schizotypal personality disorder generally typed as INTPs.
• People with antisocial personality disorder (psychopaths, sociopaths) and sadistic personality disorder (sadists) were generally NTPs.
• People with passive aggressive personality disorder were generally INPs
• Paranoids, Passive-aggressives, and depressives were ITs
• People with borderline personality disorder were NPs
• People with self defeating personality disorder were INs
• Narcissists were Ns
• Avoidants and Dependents were Is

TL;DR: You're all bonkers. Probably. Maybe.

Discuss.

Disclaimer: I just quickly copied the results with some syntax rewording. I may have got it wrong. Rely on the link, not my results summary.

I'd be interested to know if anyone has seen similar studies?

 

[PaulMaster]

I'm not crazy, everyone else is.

 

[Invisible Gorilla]

A very interesting study OP, thanks for sharing it. The way I see it is that this study doesn't really show in sufficient detail the degree to which INTPs are prone to personality disorders.

I'm no expert in when it comes to interpretting a correlation matrices but it seems to me that the degree of correlation presented by the study's table is only weak to moderate at best. I may have interpreted it wrong but I'd encourage you to check out this website: http://www.allanalytics.com/author.asp?section_id=1413&doc_id=247352

Furthermore, the study included 332 people. Statistically speaking (according the many MBTI websites) INTPs make up around 3% in the population. So we should expect that only around 10 INTPs actually paticipated in this study, which is a not really representative of the entire INTP community. Plus, the authors told us that "one should be cautious in assuming that separate pole correlations add up to a formal type".

More importantly, this study has been made based on the classification of personality disorders as defined in DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical manual of mental disorders) which has been updated into a newer version (DSM-V) in 2011. Even though DSM-IV and DSM-V are largerly similar, I think the validity of the DSM in some aspects should be questioned mainly because the contents of the DSM are largerly determined by what the majority of influential psychiatrist classify as "healthy" or "unhealthy". Sure it's based on sound evidence to some degree, but it's also based on the subjective judgment of the psychiatrists doing the classification. Some psychiatrists for example call for the removal of "schizotypical personality disorder" from DSM arguing that it's a variation in the human psyche, not a disorder. Maybe 20 years from now, if you look at DSM VII, you'd find that "Schizotypical personality disorder" is no longer recognized as a disorder but as a variation. This isn't unlikely because the earlier versions of DSM had classified homosexuality as a mental disorder. Homosexuality was reclassified from a disorder to a variation in the later versions of DSM. Regardless of how you feel about homosexuality, it's obvious that the basis on which "personality disorders" get classified as such in the DSM should be open to question. There should be a greater attempt to understand the difference between variations and disorders in the human psyche. DSM-IV vs DSM-V : http://www.psi.uba.ar/academica/car...ica_tr_personalidad_psicosis/material/dsm.pdf

That being said, I think this study gives a great starting point to study personality disorders in relation to personality types. Perhaps if there's a study that specifically involves INTPs it might present us with much more interesting findings.

 

[Happy]

A very interesting study OP, thanks for sharing it. The way I see it is that this study doesn't really show in sufficient detail the degree to which INTPs are prone to personality disorders.

I'm no expert in when it comes to interpretting a correlation matrices but it seems to me that the degree of correlation presented by the study's table is only weak to moderate at best. I may have interpreted it wrong but I'd encourage you to check out this website: http://www.allanalytics.com/author.asp?section_id=1413&doc_id=247352

Furthermore, the study included 332 people. Statistically speaking (according the many MBTI websites) INTPs make up around 3% in the population. So we should expect that only around 10 INTPs actually paticipated in this study, which is a not really representative of the entire INTP community. Plus, the authors told us that "one should be cautious in assuming that separate pole correlations add up to a formal type".

More importantly, this study has been made based on the classification of personality disorders as defined in DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical manual of mental disorders) which has been updated into a newer version (DSM-V) in 2011. Even though DSM-IV and DSM-V are largerly similar, I think the validity of the DSM in some aspects should be questioned mainly because the contents of the DSM are largerly determined by what the majority of influential psychiatrist classify as "healthy" or "unhealthy". Sure it's based on sound evidence to some degree, but it's also based on the subjective judgment of the psychiatrists doing the classification. Some psychiatrists for example call for the removal of "schizotypical personality disorder" from DSM arguing that it's a variation in the human psyche, not a disorder. Maybe 20 years from now, if you look at DSM VII, you'd find that "Schizotypical personality disorder" is no longer recognized as a disorder but as a variation. This isn't unlikely because the earlier versions of DSM had classified homosexuality as a mental disorder. Homosexuality was reclassified from a disorder to a variation in the later versions of DSM. Regardless of how you feel about homosexuality, it's obvious that the basis on which "personality disorders" get classified as such in the DSM should be open to question. There should be a greater attempt to understand the difference between variations and disorders in the human psyche. DSM-IV vs DSM-V : http://www.psi.uba.ar/academica/car...ica_tr_personalidad_psicosis/material/dsm.pdf

That being said, I think this study gives a great starting point to study personality disorders in relation to personality types. Perhaps if there's a study that specifically involves INTPs it might present us with much more interesting findings.

You make some good points; I was hoping someone would bring these up. You're certainly right in suggesting that it's not nearly a large enough sample and I'd like to further emphasise this by pointing out that the subjects were from the general population, as opposed to better results that would have been attained from clinical subjects.

Your discussion of the DSM is certainly pertinent and relevant, but I don't think the changes in the DSM invalidate the study - as you say, IV and V are largely similar.

However, I don't think the purpose of the study was necessarily to prove anything, but to establish that further, clinical, studies may be validated. Which makes me wonder if further studies were carried out... I assume this study was carried out in an effort to obtain funding for further studies.

I haven't looked further into it yet, but I will. Unfortunately, I no longer have full access to academic databases

 

[Invisible Gorilla]

You make some good points; I was hoping someone would bring these up. You're certainly right in suggesting that it's not nearly a large enough sample and I'd like to further emphasise this by pointing out that the subjects were from the general population, as opposed to better results that would have been attained from clinical subjects.

Your discussion of the DSM is certainly pertinent and relevant, but I don't think the changes in the DSM invalidate the study - as you say, IV and V are largely similar.

However, I don't think the purpose of the study was necessarily to prove anything, but to establish that further, clinical, studies may be validated. Which makes me wonder if further studies were carried out... I assume this study was carried out in an effort to obtain funding for further studies.

I haven't looked further into it yet, but I will. Unfortunately, I no longer have full access to academic databases

You're certainly right by saying that the changes in the DSM don't invalidate the study. It's just that I dislike the notion that the DSM implicitly claims (to some extent) that it can impartially differentiate between variations and disorders, which allows its classfications to be used in labelling people as "Normal" or "Not normal".

I'll try to have a look at the authors' publications and see if they published other related studies following this one. I don't have a good access to academic databases either

 

[Brontosaurie]

ESFJ - because being a hysterical, hyper-judgmental tyrant is all fine as long as society has your back

 

[Reluctantly]

ESFJ - because being a hysterical, hyper-judgmental tyrant is all fine as long as society has your back

Yes, exactly.

 

[Sinny91]

Is that doc actually being threatened with a baseball bat and butt beads?!

 

[Happy]

No. It's a chain, for flailing. But I like your interpretation better

 

[Tannhauser]

First off, creds to Happy for presenting studies. That's how an INTP forum should be

With regards to the study, I think it's a shame that psychologists playing around with mathematical concepts don't know anything about math. If I would be in their position, I would try to present regressions with, for example, the MBTI type as the dependent variable and the disorder as the independent one. That makes it explicit that we are trying to see how much of the disorder can be explained by the type. With just the correlations, we have no clue what to infer. We don't know any conditional probabilities -- if you are a certain type, are you more likely to have a certain disorder, or is it the other way around?

 

[Architect]

A very interesting study OP, thanks for sharing it. The way I see it is that this study doesn't really show in sufficient detail the degree to which INTPs are prone to personality disorders.

I agree, a better measure would be to look at r which is the ratio of general population incidence to specific. That is, how often do you find INTP's in the general population (~3%) relative to the mentally ill (in it's various forms) population? They probably didn't do this because they didn't have a large enough sample population. But given that, and considering the difficulty of accurate typing makes the study highly suspicious.

Having said that narcissism is associated with IN types.

 

[scorpiomover]

The results of the study suggested that people with Introversion, iNtuition, Thinking and Perceiving preferences may be more inclined to certain psychopathological disorders.

With regard to these particular preferences (I'm ignoring the few that don't relate to INTPs), people identified with the following disorders were typed as the following:

Then according to the study, the type most likely to be mentally well would be ESFJs.

People with schizotypal personality disorder generally typed as INTPs.

There's a high behavioural correlation with schizotypal and INTPs. But that only indicates that mentally ill INTPs would be likely to develop SPD.

People with passive aggressive personality disorder were generally INPs
Passive-aggressives were ITs

So ENTPs and INFPs are both passive-aggressive and not passive-aggressive. Contradiction.

People with antisocial personality disorder (psychopaths, sociopaths) and sadistic personality disorder (sadists) were generally NTPs.
People with passive aggressive personality disorder were generally INPs
Passive-aggressives, and depressives were ITs

Psychopaths and sociopaths generally display a ridiculous amount of over-confidence. Passive-aggressives and depressives generally show the opposite. Contradiction.

It seems that they're only considering items with ** (p < 0.05) and * (p < 0.01) as significant, and that positives indicate the second of the pairs, while negatives indicate the first of the pairs. Confusing, eh?
Also, for some reason, E, S, F and J all have only 1 disorder. But they chose to list them as E-I, S-N, T-F and J-P. T-F is the wrong way around.

The T-F dimension was significantly correlated to 8 of the 14 personality disorder scales. Seven of the 8 significant relationships were correlated to the thinking pole, whereas only the antisocial personality disorder scale was correlated to feeling.

If you look at the figures in the T-F column, there are 8 figures with a * or **. 7 of them are negative. 1 is positive, as the article suggests. However, the 1 positive figure with a 8 or ** in the T-F column, is on the row labelled "Histrionic". So there's no significant correlation between Antisocial PD and feeling. There's a significant correlation between Histrionic PD and feeling. One might have thought they'd have noticed that, as histrionics tend to be drama queens who get very emotionally expressive. So they're getting important details wrong in the summations of their figures, and aren't even bothering to comparing their conclusions to real life. This error is not covered by any of their caveats either.

The first author of the study finished his B.A in 1969, and his PhD in 1974. This study says that it was published in the Journal of Psychological Type, Vol. 58, 2001. So this isn't a PhD student. This is a psychologist with 27 years in the field to learn to get things right. The second author finished his PhD in 1992. He joined the faculty of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs in 1995, where the study was published. So he had 9 years to learn to get things right. So I can't blame this on PhDs who are making mistakes due to inexperience.

I'm thinking this study is bogus. Fill-in, to satisfy the academic requirement of publish or perish.

I'd be interested to know if anyone has seen similar studies?

I hope not.