A Transdiagnostic Approach to Examining the Incremental Predictive Power of Emotion Regulation and Basic Personality Dimensions

Although personality and emotion regulation abilities appear to overlap considerably, few studies have adopted an integrative approach by examining personality and emotion regulation together. Therefore, it is unclear how much incremental power emotion regulation demonstrates in predicting psychopathology beyond personality traits, and vice versa. Results from a community sample characterized by high levels of psychopathology (N = 299) indicated that personality and emotion regulation represent strongly related but distinguishable constructs, with both showing incremental power beyond the other in many cases in predicting self-reported and interview-rated psychopathology. More specifically, difficulties in responding adaptively to negative emotional experiences displayed predictive power beyond neuroticism and other personality traits in predicting internalizing psychopathology and psychoticism. Conversely, neuroticism displayed substantial incremental predictive power beyond emotion regulation and other five-factor model traits, especially for anxiety and other internalizing psychopathology. Other five-factor model traits also showed incremental predictive power in specific cases (e.g., agreeableness and conscientiousness showed specificity in predicting antagonism and disinhibition, respectively). These data provide a starting point for developing a finer-grained understanding of how emotion dysregulation and personality traits are implicated in a range of psychopathology, highlighting the value of adopting an integrative approach of examining emotion regulation and personality traits concurrently.