A Comparison of Passive–Aggressive and Negativistic Personality Disorders

Abstract

Passive–aggressive personality disorder (PAPD) has historically played an important role in clinical theorizing and was diagnosable prior to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed. [DSM–IV]; American Psychiatric Association, 1994), in which the construct was relabeled negativistic (NEGPD), expanded to include negative affective symptoms, and appendicized. In this study we tested the hypothesis that the expansion of PAPD to include content related to negative moods and nonspecific personality pathology compromised its discriminant validity. In an undergraduate sample (N = 1,215), a self-report measure of PAPD was only moderately related to NEGPD and showed less diagnostic overlap with other personality disorders than NEGPD. Furthermore, a conjoint factor analysis yielded a strong first factor (moodiness) that appeared less specific to passive–aggressive behavior than 3 other factors (irresponsibility, inadequacy, and contempt). We conclude that future research on this potentially important clinical construct should focus on core passive–aggressive features and abandon the negativistic content that has been added to it in successive editions of the DSM.

Acknowledgments

Portions of this study were presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality Assessment, Boston, MA, March 2011, and the annual convention for the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, San Francisco, CA, November 2010. We thank Jessica Sims and Katherine Thomas for their help on earlier drafts of this article, and Aaron Pincus for his assistance with data collection. This research was supported in part by a grant (F31MH087053, to Aidan G. C. Wright) from the National Institute of Mental Health, Washington, DC. The views expressed herein are solely those of the authors.