I must have a lot of positive affectivity since I haven't been depressed a day in my life even with stroke, getting fired and divorced in a span of 8 years. So ask your competent? doctor how to get positive affectivity.
A longitudinal study of facets of extraversion in depression and social anxiety
Introduction
The assumption that personality is related to mental health has generated a long tradition of research. A recent comprehensive review of the associations of higher order personality traits in the Big Three and Big Five models (i.e., neuroticism, extraversion, disinhibition, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness) and depressive, anxiety, and substance use disorders in adults, showed that all diagnostic groups score high on neuroticism and low on conscientiousness. Many disorders are also associated with low levels of extraversion, with the largest effect sizes for dysthymic disorder and social anxiety disorder (Kotov, Gamez, Schmidt, & Watson, 2010).
Most of the literature on personality and emotional disorders has focused on the broad traits of neuroticism and extraversion. Whereas different disorders may be characterized by similar general levels of neuroticism or extraversion, more powerful or more specific associations with psychopathology might exist at the lower levels in the personality trait hierarchy (Klein, Kotov, & Bufferd, 2011). Examining these relations at both trait and facet levels is necessary to identify the specific level driving a given association (Naragon-Gainey, Watson, & Markon, 2009).
Here we will focus on facets of extraversion in relation to depression and social anxiety as these disorders have shown consistent relationships with the general trait of extraversion in numerous previous studies (Kotov et al., 2010). Extraversion can be conceptualized as a multidimensional higher order trait that includes interpersonal/social as well as positive emotional aspects (Watson & Clark, 1997). Although facets of extraversion are named differently and inconsistently in the literature, extraversion typically includes the following major facets: affiliation (warmth and gregariousness), positive affectivity (joy and enthusiasm), energy (liveliness and activity), and ascendance (exhibitionism and dominance) (Watson & Clark, 1997). In relation to depression and social anxiety it is pertinent to understand whether the higher order trait of extraversion is the most relevant level to understand depression and social anxiety or whether lower order facets yield additional and more specific information to understand their interrelationships.
Only a very limited number of studies have simultaneously assessed the relation of different facets of extraversion with depression or social anxiety, with mixed results. Examining the six extraversion facets of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992), Bienvenu et al. (2004) found that persons diagnosed with life time depression only scored lower on assertiveness than controls in a community sample, while persons with life time social phobia obtained lower scores for all facets, in particular for warmth and positive affectivity. Using multiple regression analyses only low warmth as one of the extraversion facets of the NEO PI-R predicted severity of depression in acutely depressed persons (Costa, Bagby, Herbst, and McCrae, 2005), whereas only low positive affectivity was predictive of depression severity in college students (Chioqueta & Stiles, 2005). Of special note is a recent study of Naragon-Gainey et al. (2009), who found that symptoms of social anxiety were related to all four analyzed facets of extraversion (sociability, ascendance, positive emotionality, fun-seeking), whereas depressive symptom severity correlated strongly only with low positive emotionality. Although this study, in contrast to the earlier study of Bienvenu et al. (2004), did control for the high co-variation of depression with social anxiety, the study was limited to self-report severity measures and no formal psychiatric diagnoses were made. Data on the association of facets of extraversion with psychiatric diagnoses of depression, social anxiety and other disorders while accounting for their high comorbidity are in need of further investigation (Naragon-Gainey et al., 2009, Watson and Naragon-Gainey, 2010). Moreover, as self-reported levels of extraversion are contaminated by the presence of a depressive or social anxiety disorder (Spinhoven, van der Does, Ormel, Zitman, & Penninx, 2013), a longitudinal study allowing the examination of associations between stable levels of extraversion, depression and social anxiety may attenuate this contamination because of state effects.
To summarize, the overall aim of the present longitudinal study is to assess the importance of lower order facets of extraversion (i.e., positive affectivity, sociability and activity) in depression and social anxiety. More specifically, we will investigate: (a) which facets of extraversion characterize depression and social anxiety compared to other emotional disorders and controls; and (b) which facets of extraversion show differential relations with depression and social anxiety. We expected lower positive affectivity and lower sociability in depression and social anxiety compared to other anxiety disorders and controls. Moreover, we expected lower levels of positive affectivity in depression than in social anxiety, and lower levels of sociability in social anxiety than in depression.
No comments:
Post a Comment