Disintegration: A reconceptualization of psychosis proneness as a personality trait separate from the Big Five

Abstract

A nine-facet hierarchical taxonomy of "Disintegration", a trait-like disposition that causes variations in psychotic-like behavior, is proposed, along with the scales to assess it. Strong correlations were demonstrated in students (n = 466) between lower-level dimensions, independent of the assessment method. Disintegration lay beyond the Five-Factor Model (FFM) space. This finding was replicated across informant types (self, mother, and father), samples (students and a national representative sample, n = 1001), and units of analyses (facets and items). The most frequent approach to preserve the FFM taxonomy of both normal and non-normal personality variants - mapping psychotic-like phenomena onto the Openness domain - found little support in our data. Disintegration was normally distributed in the general population.