Recent research has emphasized the importance of maladaptive personality traits, which are associated with a number of clinically relevant behaviors. There is a large literature on maladaptive traits and a number of maladaptive trait models. Drawing from this literature, the American Psychiatric Association (2013) recently published the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013), which includes a formal model of twenty-five maladaptive traits for the diagnosis of personality disorder. There have been a number of studies examining the traits within this model in terms of validity, although these studies have often not included additional maladaptive traits that may provide incremental criterion validity. This research has also been largely limited to self-report studies, which neither take into account the perspective of informants, who may be privy to information about traits that are unavailable to the targets of trait ratings, nor the role of insight on the part of targets or informants about how others might perceive these traits (i.e., meta-perception). In this study, I intended to cover some of the gaps in the maladaptive trait literature in two ways. First, I examined the incremental criterion validity of maladaptive traits not included in the benchmark DSM-5 trait model on a series of clinically relevant behaviors. Second, I examined the degree to which the ratings of maladaptive traits provided by knowledgeable informants corresponded to the ratings provided by targets of these ratings. Results indicated additional maladaptive traits provided incremental criterion validity over and above the traits of the formal DSM-5 model on all clinically relevant behaviors. Results further suggested that targets and informants provided unique perspectives on maladaptive traits, and that the role of meta-perception on target-informant agreement on trait ratings was modest. However, these results differed depending on the trait rated and the relationship of the informant to the target. These findings have implications for future research on maladaptive traits (e.g., how many traits should be included in a model of maladaptive traits) as well as for clinical personality assessment (e.g., who is best poised to provide information about which personality traits).
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