The structure of pathological personality traits and temperament in a Persian community sample

The present study examined the extent to which the currently established factor structure of the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5; Krueger et al., 2013) generalizes to a large Persian community sample, as well as relations between the resulting PID-5 factors and two temperament measures. Cross-sectional data came from 946 adults (65% female) from western Iran. With the use of exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) with target rotation, we found factor loadings that showed fairly similar patterns to those found in two previous meta-analytic PID-5 studies with predominantly North American and European samples (Watters & Bagby, 2018; Somma et al., 2019). Despite slight differences in each of the target rotations, there were moderate congruence coefficients (~0.85) between loadings for the five PID-5 domains, with the weakest evidence supporting the Disinhibition factor. The resulting PID-5 factors showed meaningful associations with temperament domains assessed via the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI; Cloninger, 1994) and Temperament Evaluation of Memphis, Pisa, Paris and San Diego-Autoquestionnaire (TEMPS-A; Akiskal et al., 2005). Overall, our findings suggest that the documented structure of personality pathology assessed by the PID-5 generalizes somewhat to this sample of Persian participants, and pathological personality traits show important overlap with temperament, although these constructs are meaningfully distinct.