department of psychiatry and behavioral science researcher reviews links between personality and mental illness
Last month, Roman Kotov, PhD, was invited to the University of Groningen in the Netherlands to conduct a Master Class in the School of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences on the associations between personality and psychiatric disorders.
Dr. Kotov and colleagues recently completed a meta-analysis of 175 research studies that demonstrated significant associations between personality traits and categories of mental illness. The report was published in the September 2010 edition of Psychological Bulletin. Dr. Kotov is a Research Scientist in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Stony Brook University.
Although the links between personality and mental illness have been recognized for centuries, it is only during the past twenty-five years that they have become subject to quantitative analysis, due to a relatively stable consensus among researchers about the classification of personality traits and psychiatric disorders.
In his master class, Dr. Kotov reviewed the results of the meta-analysis, surveying etiological theories that might account for the links between personality and mental illness and summarizing what is known about the contributions of personality to comorbidity, severity, chronicity, and treatment of mental illness.
