The Structure of Pathological Personality Traits and Temperament in a Persian Community Sample

The present study examined the extent to which the currently established factor structure of the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5; Krueger et al., 2013) generalizes to a large Persian community sample, as well as relations between the resulting PID-5 factors and two temperament measures. Cross-sectional data came from 946 adults (65% female) from western Iran. Using exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) with target rotation, we found factor loadings that showed fairly similar patterns to those found in two previous meta-analytic PID-5 studies with predominantly North American and European samples (Watters & Bagby, 2018; Somma et al., 2019). Despite slight differences in each of the target rotations, there were moderate congruence coefficients (~0.85) between loadings for the five PID-5 domains, with the weakest evidence supporting the Disinhibition factor. The resulting PID-5 factors showed meaningful associations with temperament domains assessed via the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI; Cloninger, 1994) and Temperament Evaluation of Memphis, Pisa, Paris and San Diego-Autoquestionnaire (TEMPS-A; Akiskal et al., 2005). Overall, our findings suggest that the documented structure of personality pathology assessed by the PID-5 generalizes somewhat to this sample of Persian participants and pathological personality traits shows important overlap with temperament, although these constructs are meaningfully distinct.