A study conducted in Poland examined the relationship between maladaptive personality traits and symptoms of depression and anxiety. It found that impaired identity and negative affectivity were strong predictors of both depression and anxiety, while empathy and detachment were specifically associated with anxiety symptoms. The research was published in Scientific Reports.
Maladaptive personality traits are enduring patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are inflexible, unhealthy, and interfere with a person’s ability to function effectively in daily life or maintain fulfilling relationships. These traits often cause distress to the individual or those around them and can create difficulties in work, social, and personal contexts. Unlike typical personality traits, maladaptive traits are extreme, rigid, and resistant to change. Although they are linked to personality disorders, they can also occur in less severe forms.
The main domains of maladaptive personality traits include negative affectivity, detachment, antagonism, disinhibition, and psychoticism. Negative affectivity involves frequent experiences of negative emotions such as anxiety and sadness. Detachment refers to social withdrawal and emotional coldness. Antagonism includes traits like hostility, manipulativeness, and grandiosity, while disinhibition involves impulsivity and poor self-control. Psychoticism reflects eccentric behaviors, unusual beliefs, and distorted perceptions of reality.
Researchers Monika Olga Jańczak and Emilia Soroko aimed to explore the relationship between the level of personality functioning, maladaptive personality traits, and symptoms of depression and anxiety in middle-aged and older adults. They hypothesized that individuals with lower personality functioning and more pronounced maladaptive traits would show higher levels of depression and anxiety. They also predicted that internalizing traits—such as negative affectivity and detachment—would be more strongly related to these symptoms than externalizing traits like disinhibition and dissociality.
The study included 530 Polish adults, 52% of whom were women. The average age was 47, with ages ranging from 30 to 97. Most participants had a university education, and 62% were married.
Participants completed several assessments: the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Questionnaire and the Patient Health Questionnaire to measure anxiety and depression symptoms; the Self and Interpersonal Functioning Scale to assess personality functioning; and the Personality Inventory for ICD-11 to evaluate maladaptive personality traits. Personality functioning in this context refers to a person’s capacity for stable identity, self-direction, empathy, and intimacy—core aspects that reflect healthy or impaired personality development.
The results revealed some gender differences. Men were more likely to show impairments in empathy, intimacy, detachment, and dissociality, while women tended to have greater impairments in identity and self-direction, along with higher levels of anxiety.
Almost all maladaptive traits and indicators of impaired personality functioning were associated with symptoms of depression and anxiety. These traits were also slightly more pronounced in younger participants within the sample.
Using statistical modeling, the researchers identified which traits were most predictive of anxiety and depression. Anxiety symptoms were best predicted by impairments in identity and empathy, elevated negative affectivity, and lower levels of detachment. Depression, on the other hand, was best predicted by impaired identity and negative affectivity.
“Consistent with our hypothesis, both personality dysfunction (identity and empathy) and pathological traits (negative affectivity and detachment) emerged as significant predictors of these emotional disorders,” the authors concluded. “These findings highlight the critical role of both components of the dimensional model of personality disorders in understanding depression and anxiety symptoms.”
While the study contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between personality traits and emotional distress, the authors caution that the cross-sectional design does not permit causal conclusions. Additionally, all data were collected through self-report measures, which may introduce bias and affect the accuracy of the findings.
The paper, “Level of personality functioning and maladaptive personality traits in relation to depression and anxiety symptoms in middle and older adults,” was authored by Monika Olga Jańczak and Emilia Soroko.
