Dimensional assessment of personality in an out-patient sample: Relations of the systems of Millon and Cloninger

The Cloninger Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) and the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI-II) are both self-report inventories that can be used to assess per sonality reliably in clinical samples. Both instruments were administered to 103 consecutive psychiatric out-patients with or without personality disorders. The goals were to assess the convergent validity of the two instruments, to replicate the findings of Svrakic et al. (1993) Archives of General Psychiatry, 50, 991-999, about the differential diagnosis of Axis II disorders, and to analyse the relations of. Millon's measures of Axis 1 disorders with Cloninger's measures. We observed a strong convergent validity between the instruments; the seven dimensions of the TCI accounted for most of the variance in MCMI-II measures of both Axis 1 and Axis 2 disorders. As reported by Svrakic et al. (1993) Archives of General Psychiatry, 50, 991-999, in in-patients, low self-directedness and low cooperativeness were confirmed to be the essential features of all personality disorders in outpatients. In addition, self-transcendence, the third of Cloninger's character dimensions, was observed to be a strong correlate of severe Axis-1 psychopathology, including manic and delusional disorders. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.