- Type:#article
- Subject: p-factor
- Bibtex: @caspi2014
- Bibliography: Caspi, A., Houts, R. M., Belsky, D. W., Goldman-Mellor, S. J., Harrington, H., Israel, S., … Moffitt, T. E. (2014). The p Factor: One General Psychopathology Factor in the Structure of Psychiatric Disorders? Clinical Psychological Science, 2(2), 119–137. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702613497473
- Longitudinal study, looking at the structure of psychopathology.
- “Dimensionality, persistence, co-occurrence, and sequential comorbidity of mental disorders across 20 years, from adolescence to midlife.”
- Internalizing, Externalizing, Thought Disorder (higher-order factors from specific diagnoses), but one general psychopathology dimension (p-factor) explained psychopathology better.
We propose that p influences present/absent performance on hundreds of psychiatric symptoms, which are typically aggregated into dozens of distinct diagnoses, which further aggregate into two overarching Externalizing versus Internalizing domains, which finally aggregate into one normal distributed dimension of psychopathology from low to high: p.
An etiological hypothesis is that the origins of p begin with genetic liability, with the genes involved operating in pleiotropic fashion to enhance risk for any and all disorders rather than breeding true to any single disorder.