Adult separation anxiety: Personality characteristics of a neglected clinical syndrome.

Abstract

Over the past two decades, interest in the relationship between personality and psychopathology has resurged. However, the clinical problem of adult separation anxiety (ASA) has been largely excluded from this endeavor due to the age-of-onset criterion in older editions of the DSM that prohibited first-onset diagnoses in adulthood. This study tests relationships between ASA symptoms and higher- and lower-order personality traits in a community sample of 565 women. It accounts for systematic error by utilizing informant report, two personality inventories, and data from two time points over three years, and by adjusting for mood state. It also tests longitudinal ASA-personality models. Results indicate that ASA is robustly associated with negative emotionality and its facet of stress reaction, as well as with aggression, alienation, and absorption to somewhat lesser degrees. These relationships are not due to overlap with other traits (except in the case of alienation), or mood-state biases, and they are verified by informants. Moreover, negative temperament predicts greater levels of ASA three years later, adjusting for baseline ASA. Neither positive emotionality or temperament, nor positive emotionality's lower-order scales, were uniquely related to ASA in multitrait models, whereas relationships between ASA and disinhibition and constraint were inconsistent. These findings lay the groundwork for future research testing the mechanisms and causal links between these personality traits and ASA and may help clinicians anticipate traits that are associated with ASA in order to tailor treatments to patients' personalities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).