Clinical application of the five-factor model.

The Five-Factor Model (FFM) has become the predominant dimensional model of general personality structure.The purpose of this paper is to suggest a clinical application.A substantial body of research indicates that the personality disorders included within the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) can be understood as extreme and/or maladaptive variants of the FFM (the acronym “DSM” refers to any particular edition of the APA DSM). In addition, the current proposal for the forthcoming fifth edition of the DSM (i.e., DSM-5) is shifting closely toward an FFM dimensional trait model of personality disorder. Advantages of this shifting conceptualization are discussed, including treatment planning. The Five-Factor Model (FFM) has arguably become the predominant dimensional model of general personality structure within psychology (Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, 2005; John, Naumann, & Soto, 2008). The FFM was derived originally from studies of the English language with an aim toward identifying the essential domains of personality. This lexical hypothesis suggests that the relative importance of a trait is indicated by the number of terms that have been developed within a language to describe the different magnitudes and nuances of that trait, and the structure of the traits is evident by the relationship among the trait terms (see Goldberg, 1993, for a discussion of and support for the lexical paradigm). Five broad domains have been isolated in the lexical studies of the English language: Extraversion (otherwise known as surgency or positive affectivity), Agreeableness (versus antagonism), Conscientiousness (or constraint), Neuroticism (emotional instability or negative affectivity), and Openness to Experience (intellect or unconventionality). Subsequent lexical studies have been conducted on many additional languages (e.g., Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Filipino, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish), and this research has confirmed reasonably well the