Ljiljana B. Lazarevic

The Big Five personality traits, particularly Negative Emotionality, are well-established correlates of internalizing symptoms. However, less is known about whether Disintegration, a proposed basic personality trait reflecting proneness to psychotic-like experiences and beliefs, accounts for additional individual differences in internalizing experiences in everyday life. The present study examined the incremental contribution of Disintegration beyond the Big Five to daily depression, anxiety, and rumination. A sample of 156 psychology students completed measures of Disintegration and the Big Five, followed by seven days of daily diary assessments (916 observations). Multilevel models were used to examine associations between personality traits and daily internalizing experiences. When all six personality traits were considered simultaneously, Disintegration was uniquely associated with higher daily depression (β = .25), anxiety (β = .24), and rumination (β = .17), alongside Negative Emotionality. Adding Disintegration to the Big Five increased explained variance by 10.25% for depression, 7.79% for anxiety, and 2.69% for rumination. Sensitivity analyses excluding potentially overlapping symptom-related content supported the robustness of the associations with depression and anxiety. These findings suggest that Disintegration contributes to explaining between-person differences in everyday internalizing experiences beyond established personality dimensions, extending evidence for its incremental validity to repeated daily assessments.

This preregistered systematic review and meta-analysis examined associations between personality and traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine (TCAM) preference, including, but not limited to, attitudes, use, and intention to use. We synthesized evidence from 35 published and unpublished observational and experimental studies (k = 405, N = 44,434). In multilevel meta-analytic models with cluster-robust variance estimation, Big Five and HEXACO traits had overall negligible correlations (r = -0.05–0.06) with TCAM preference. In contrast, the Disintegration trait showed a small positive association (r = 0.19, CI [0.06, 0.32]), albeit most of the effects (k = 33 out of 40) came from a single paper. Moderator analyses revealed that the relationship between TCAM preference and Extraversion, Openness to Experience and Disintegration varied across several factors. No systematic evidence of publication bias was detected. Psychotic-like experiences and behaviors, as captured by Disintegration, may offer a promising direction for understanding TCAM preferences, warranting further investigation.

Basic personality models, such as the HEXACO framework, are intended to cover the personality space exhaustively. However, it is debated whether the dispositional proneness to psychotic-like experiences and behaviors – conceptualized here as a potential seventh personality trait termed Disintegration – can be adequately integrated into existing models or necessitates their extension. Due to a lack of meta-analytic evidence, this study examines the true magnitude of these associations and tests the generalizability of Disintegration’s discriminant validity across diverse populations and assessment contexts. We conducted a multivariate random-effects meta-analysis of 47 samples (N = 17,092). The main findings indicate that D shows small (ρ = |.01| with Openness) to moderate correlations (ρ = |.37| with Conscientiousness) with the six HEXACO dimensions. Critically, these associations fall within the internal boundaries of the HEXACO intercorrelations (from ρ = |.00| to ρ = |.38| between Honesty-Humility and Agreeableness). Furthermore, the HEXACO model accounts for at most 29% of the variance in Disintegration, and Disintegration facets load primarily on a distinct latent factor rather than distributing across HEXACO dimensions. These findings were robust across sensitivity analyses (outliers, hierarchical effect size dependency, publication bias), moderator conditions (proportions of patients, students, translated measures), and levels of analysis (domain- and facet-level). Given the evidence supporting discriminant validity, we encourage future research to examine the predictive utility of a seven-factor HEXACOD model, to develop and validate translated DELTA versions in non-Serbian samples, and to refine the operationalization of the low pole of Disintegration to improve its psychometric properties. The personality space may be more complex than current lexical models suggest, and Disintegration might offer a theoretically grounded and empirically supported candidate for improved personality space coverage.

This pre-registered meta-analysis examines the discriminant validity of Disintegration (D), the trait-like conceptualization of psychotic-like experiences and behaviors (PLEBs), in relation to the HEXACO personality traits. The main finding is that D shows small to moderate intercorrelations (i.e., range = |.01| - |.31|) ranging within the HEXACO intercorrelations. The main implication is that D as a most recent operationalization of PLEBs is not covered by existing taxonomies, but rather suggests its addition, which may allow for improved predictions of personality outcomes by covering previously neglected variance, or by capturing new phenomena. Limitations of the primary studies aggregated and the extended HEXACO plus D model are discussed.

Contemporary research increasingly supports continuous models of psychotic-like experiences and behaviors (PLEBs), yet these models are rarely integrated with rich historical traditions that repeatedly describe similar phenomena. We address this gap by mapping historical accounts onto Disintegration, a broad personality dimension capturing individual differences in biased reality testing across perceptual, cognitive, affective, motivational, and behavioral domains. Using a structured cross-epoch approach, we synthesized descriptions from major scholars in Antiquity (500 BCE – 500 CE), the Medieval era (500–1500 CE), and the Pre-Modern period (1500 – c. 1850 CE), and organized these descriptions along Disintegration facets (i.e., perceptual distortions, paranoia, magical thinking, cognitive/executive impairment, somatoform dysregulation, enhanced awareness, apathy/depression, mania and flattened affect). To overcome the scale and heterogeneity of historical corpora, we used large language models (LLMs) to support concept detection and clustering, with subsequent expert validation of sources and interpretations. Across more than two millennia, historical descriptions revealed substantial phenomenological continuity in PLEBs, while explanatory frameworks shifted from humoral and temperamental accounts, through theological-moral interpretations, to early clinical psychopathology. These findings suggest that contemporary dimensional models like Disintegration may represent a systematic framework for organizing experiential patterns that have been repeatedly described throughout historical records.

Published claims should be reproducible, yielding the same result when the same analysis is applied to the same data^1,2. Here we assess reproducibility in a stratified random sample of 600 papers published from 2009 to 2018 in 62 journals spanning the social and behavioural sciences. The authors of 144 (24.0%, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 20.8-27.6%) papers made data available to assess reproducibility and, for 38 others, we obtained source data to reconstruct the dataset. We assessed 143 out of the 182 available datasets and found that 76.6 (53.6%, 95% CI = 45.8-60.7%) papers were rated as precisely reproducible and 105.0 (73.5%, 95% CI = 66.4-80.0%) were rated as at least approximately reproducible (within 15% of the original effects or within 0.05 of original P values) after inverse weighting each of the 551 claims by the number of claims per paper. We observed higher reproducibility for papers from political science and economics compared with other fields, for more recent papers compared with older papers and for papers from journals that require data sharing. Implementation of measures to verify that research is reproducible is needed to support trustworthiness in the complex enterprise of knowledge production^3,4.

The Big Five (OCEAN) and HEXACO models provide widely accepted frameworks for understanding personality but fail to capture individual differences in proneness to psychotic-like experiences and behaviors. To address this gap, the Disintegration trait, a broad dimension encompassing nine subfacets, has been proposed. While prior cross-sectional studies confirmed its structural distinctiveness, longitudinal evidence of its stability has been lacking. We report two large-scale longitudinal studies spanning ten months and up to two-years, respectively, examining the structural and rank-order stability of Disintegration within extended personality models. Study 1 examined the HEXACOD model (HEXACO + Disintegration) across three measurement waves in Serbian adolescents (N = 1,000). Study 2 evaluated the DOCEAN model (Big Five + Disintegration) across three waves in a sample representative of the German adult sample (N = 2,629). Across both studies, Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (ESEM) demonstrated excellent model fit regarding the invariance of both seven-factor (HEXACOD) and six-factor (DOCEAN) models over time. Rank-order stability of Disintegration was found to be high, albeit somewhat lower compared to other traits. Disintegration exhibited stable structural boundaries while manifesting through bounded fluctuations, and was consistently associated with a degree of temporal instability of the broader personality system.