THE PERSONALITY PSYCHOPATHOLOGY-5 (PSY-5) - CONSTRUCTS AND MMPI-2 SCALES

The Personality Psychopathology Five (PSY-5; A. R. Harkness & J. L. McNulty, 1994) is a dimensional descriptive system for personality and its disorders. Replicated rational selection was used to generate Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2; J. N. Butcher, W. G. Dahlstrom, J. R. Graham, A. Tellegen, & B. Kaemmer, 1989)-based scales for the PSY-5. The scales are Aggressiveness, 18 items; Psychoticism, 25 items; Constraint, 29 items; Negative Emotionality/Neuroticism, 33 items; and Positive Emotionality/Extraversion, 34 items. In three clinical samples with Ns of 328, 156, and 1,196; a college sample with an N of 2,928; and MMPI-2 normative samples with an N of 2,567, alphas ranged from .65 to .88. For 838 college students who had also completed Tellegen's (1982) Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ), correlations between PSY-5 scales and corresponding MPQ superfactors were as follows: Constraint, r = .57, p < .01; Negative Emotionality/Neuroticism, r = .72, p < .01; and Positive Emotionality/Extraversion, r = .62, p < .01. PSY-5 Aggressiveness correlated r = .59, (p < .01) with MPQ Aggression. PSY-5 Psychoticism correlated r = .61 (p < .01) with MPQ Alienation.