Aidan G. C. Wright

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at University of Pittsburgh

Very little is known about the daily stability and fluctuation of personality pathology. To address this gap in knowledge, we investigated the naturalistic manifestation of personality pathology over the course of 100 days. A group of individuals (N = 101) diagnosed with any personality disorder (PD) completed a daily diary study over 100 consecuti...

Psychiatric diagnostic covariation suggests that the underlying structure of psychopathology is not one of circumscribed disorders. Quantitative modeling of individual differences in diagnostic patterns has uncovered several broad domains of mental disorder liability, of which the Internalizing and Externalizing spectra have garnered the greatest s...

The nomothetic approach (i.e., the study of interindividual variation) dominates analyses of clinical data, even though its assumption of homogeneity across people and time is often violated. The idiographic approach (i.e., the study of intraindividual variation) is best suited for analyses of heterogeneous clinical data, but its person-specific me...

In this naturalistic study, the authors adopt the lens of interpersonal theory to examine between- and within-person differences in dynamic processes of daily affect and interpersonal behaviors among individuals (N = 101) previously diagnosed with personality disorders who completed daily diaries over the course of 100 days. Dispositional ratings o...

Recent editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) conceptualize personality disorders (PDs) as categorical constructs, but high PD co-occurrence suggests underlying latent dimensions. Moreover, several borderline PD criteria resemble Criterion A of the new DSM-5 Section III...

Big-5 personality traits are robustly associated with sleep. Most theorizing points to day-level bi-directional processes; however, few studies have examined associations between personality traits and sleep at the day-level. To do so ecological momentary assessments were used in four studies (Study 1 N = 330 university students over 10 days, Study...

Theories of empathy highlight the importance of affective congruence, which is the degree to which we match an interaction partner in negative or positive affect. However, no research to date has used a multi-pronged assessment approach necessary to investigate whether and how affective congruence typically relates to empathy (i.e., perception of o...

Theories of empathy highlight the importance of affective congruence, which is the degree to which we match an interaction partner in negative or positive affect. However, no research to date has used a multi-pronged assessment approach necessary to investigate whether and how affective congruence typically relates to empathy (i.e., perception of o...

Ambulatory Assessment (AA) studies have proliferated in mental health science, promising unparalleled insights into the dynamic nature of mental health. The high methodological heterogeneity of AA studies calls for the harmonization of approaches and the establishment of research standards. This expert consensus provides an overview of best-practic...

Conceptualization and assessment of psychopathology is shifting away from discrete diagnoses to basic dimensions and processes. However, this transition is mostly supported by cross-sectional research, focusing on between-persons differences despite psychopathological processes being conceptualized at the within-persons level. This lack of within-p...

The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) is a dimensional nosological system that addresses key limitations with categorical frameworks, including heterogeneity, boundary, and comorbidity issues. The HiTOP consortium recently developed a new self-report measure, the HiTOP-Patient Reported Outcome (HiTOP-PRO), designed to operationalize...

Objective: Alcohol use offers social benefits for young adults, but also carries risk of significant negative consequences. Better understanding of processes driving alcohol use for those who experience negative consequences can prevent these harms. These at-risk young adults likely have drinking patterns in common and patterns unique to each indiv...

Smartphone sensors can continuously and unobtrusively collect clinically relevant behavioral data, allowing for more precise symptom monitoring in clinical and research settings. However, progress in identifying behavioral markers of psychopathology from smartphone sensors has been stalled by research on diagnostic categories that are heterogenous...

Psychology is concerned with both general laws of psychological functioning and with the individual person. The debate surrounding nomothetics and idiographics has been brought up repeatedly, but it has never been completely resolved. We therefore aim to provide conceptual clarity on how the terms “idiographic” and “nomothetic” are used and how con...

Disinhibition is a personality trait with broad health implications and has been included in several prominent models of maladaptive personality traits and psychopathology, such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, Alternative Model of Personality Disorders and the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology. Cr...

Repeated assessments in everyday life allow for ecologically valid data on dynamic, within-person stress processes. However, typical designs offer little information the immediate shape of affective responses following daily stressors, including the influence of situational and person-level variables. In a combined clinical and community sample (N=...

Both self-determination theory (SDT) and contemporary integrative interpersonal theory (CIIT) suggest that state authenticity occurs in social interactions conducive to autonomy and affiliation. However, few studies have investigated associations between state authenticity and interpersonal context. We investigated state authenticity during social...

Theories of empathy highlight the importance of affective congruence, which is the degree to which we match an interaction partner in negative or positive affect. However, no research to date has used a multi-pronged assessment approach necessary to investigate whether and how affective congruence typically relates to empathy (i.e., perception of o...

Psychological functioning is shaped by how people navigate their environment. Accordingly, psychopathology is often caused and maintained by patterns of responding to the environment that do not meet situational demands. In particular, psychopathology is often expressed in an inflexible or intense manner of coping with stressful situations. Prior r...

Research in psychology can have various foci, ranging from the psychological dynamics of single individuals to the generalization across individuals, often termed idiographics and nomothetics, respectively. However, terminological ambiguities have limited communication clarity about idiographics and nomothetics. Importantly, whether studies are sui...

Ambulatory assessment is widely popular in research settings for its ability to assess real world functioning in context. It can be useful for estimating an individual’s typical level of a behavior (individual mean), how (un)stable that behavior is (individual standard deviation), how behaviors associate with others or specific contexts (within-per...

In this study, we reduced the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM-5) to its constituent symptoms and reorganized them based on patterns of covariation in individuals’ ( N = 14,762) self-reported experiences of the symptoms to form an empirically derived hierarchical framework of clinical phenomena. Speci...

This chapter describes the value of using Contemporary Integrative Interpersonal Theory (CIIT) to understand the self and social impairments that define personality disorders as a group. CIIT’s major tenets are summarized, with a particular emphasis on elaborating how the self and self-functioning are an integral part of interpersonal experience an...

Objective Research challenged the notion that neuroticism correlates with affective variability, suggesting that it may result from statistical artifacts due to the non‐normal distribution of negative affect. We aim to advance this line of research by (a) introducing affect balance as a normally distributed measure of affective well‐being and (b) e...

Etiological models of alcohol and cannabis use disorders hypothesize that people are more likely to use and consume more of these substances when they experience heightened negative affect, yet recent EMA studies found no evidence for the daily association between negative affect and substance use. However, the theory underlying affect regulation o...

Research in psychology can have various foci, ranging from the psychological dynamics of single individuals to the generalization across individuals, often termed idiographics and nomothetics, respectively. However, terminological ambiguities have limited communication clarity about idiographics and nomothetics. Importantly, whether studies are sui...

Background: Efforts to identify risk and resilience factors for anxiety severity and course during the COVID-19 pandemic have focused primarily on demographic rather than psychological variables. Intolerance of uncertainty (IU), a transdiagnostic risk factor for anxiety, may be a particularly relevant vulnerability factor. Method: N = 641 adults wi...

Objective: Interpersonal and emotional functioning are closely linked and reciprocally influence one another. Contemporary integrative interpersonal theory (CIIT) offers a useful framework to conceptualize these patterns and guide interventions in cases where these patterns result in dysfunction. Stress processes offer several dynamic frameworks to...

Perceived social support is an important construct because of its main effects on good mental and physical health. Although historically viewed as a trait-like construct, there is growing interest in perceived social support as a dynamic construct that ebbs and flows over time and across situations. Consequently, there is a need for an instrument t...

Importance Clinical theory and behavioral studies suggest that people experiencing suicidal crisis are often unable to find constructive solutions or incorporate useful information into their decisions, resulting in premature convergence on suicide and neglect of better alternatives. However, prior studies of suicidal behavior have not formally exa...

Theoretical accounts of narcissism emphasize the dynamic shifting of self-states in response to social feedback. Status threats are thought to set narcissism’s dynamics in motion. Naturalistic ecological momentary assessment (EMA) studies have characterized dynamics of narcissistic grandiosity and vulnerability in relation to perceptions of the int...

The alternative model of personality disorders (AMPD) traits were designed to maintain continuity with the Section II personality disorder (PD) diagnoses by retaining the same clinical information. Whether the AMPD traits achieve this is not well established. Prior work testing incremental validity of AMPD traits and Section II diagnoses is limited...

Personality and psychopathology have generally been regarded as distinct aspects of human behavior, largely studied by researchers from different disciplines. However, an established body of research shows a common structure for personality and psychopathology phenotypes. This evidence has led to significant changes in how psychiatric problems are...

Background Previous studies demonstrate a link between irritability and suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) in youth samples. However, they have mostly assessed irritability in community samples and as a largely dispositional (i.e. trait‐like) construct. Thus, it remains unclear to what extent links between irritability and STBs reflect within‐p...

Sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals experience higher rates of depression compared to their peers. However, little is known about the day-to-day processes that link SGM experiences to depression. In responses from SGM young adults (N=252), who predominantly identified as bi+(sexual/romantic interest in multiple genders)cisgender women and...

Aktuelle Klassifikationssysteme für psychische Störungen wie das DSM-5 und ICD-11 stehen zunehmend in der Kritik, die Komplexität psychischer Probleme nicht adäquat abzubilden. Ungünstig sind insbesondere die implizite Orientierung am medizinischen Krankheitsmodell, die mangelnde strukturelle Validität sowie die kategoriale Abgrenzung zu psychische...

Alcohol use offers social benefits for young adults, but also carries the risk of significant negative consequences. Better understanding of processes driving alcohol use in this population can prevent these harms. Young adults have drinking patterns in common due to shared life circumstances (e.g., moving out, going to college) as well as patterns...

Psychological functioning is shaped by how people navigate their environment. Accordingly, psychopathology is often caused and maintained by patterns of responding to the environment that do not meet situational demands. In particular, psychopathology is often expressed in an inflexible or intense manner of coping with stressful situations. Prior r...

Contemporary integrative interpersonal theory (CIIT) provides a framework for understanding how the self, others, emotions, and behavior are integrated in interpersonal situations. A key process within an interpersonal interaction is that of emotion regulation, whereby an individual navigates their own emotional reactivity in response to the interp...

Researchers and clinicians working within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Fifth Edition, Text Rev (DSM-5-TR) framework face a difficult question: what does it mean to have an evidence-based assessment of a nonevidence-based diagnostic construct? Alternative nosological approaches conceptualize psychopathology as (a) hiera...

Quantitative, empirical approaches to establishing the structure of psychopathology hold promise to improve on traditional psychiatric classification systems. The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) is a framework that summarizes the substantial and growing body of quantitative evidence on the structure of psychopathology. To achieve i...

This study reexamined the factor structure of drinking motives using 205 unique items from 18 drinking motives scales with the inclusion of social tension reduction motives, which have been largely neglected in the literature. A new scale was created and compared with the Drinking Motives Questionnaire-Revised (DMQ-R) to predict alcohol use/problem...

In this study, we reduced the DSM-5 to its constituent symptoms and reorganized them based on patterns of covariation in individuals’ (n = 14,762) self-reported experiences of the symptoms to form an empirically derived hierarchical framework of clinical phenomena. Specifically, we used the points of agreement among hierarchical principal component...

Objective Aging is associated with increased pro-inflammatory gene expression and systemic inflammation, and psychosocial stress may accelerate these changes. Mindfulness interventions show promise for reducing psychosocial stress and extending healthspan. Inflammatory pathways may play a role. In a sample of lonely older adults, we tested whether...

Background: There is an increasing interest in conceptualizing psychopathology in terms of transdiagnostic dimensions and processes. These can be organized hierarchically, for instance, aggression and harmful substance use are specific manifestations of externalizing psychopathology. However, most of this work is cross-sectional and focuses on indi...

The Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD) traits were designed to maintain continuity with the Section II personality disorder (PD) diagnoses by retaining the same clinical information. Whether the AMPD traits achieve this is not well-established. Prior work testing incremental validity of AMPD traits and Section II diagnoses is limited...

This chapter describes the collaborative process that is underway to develop measures for the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP). Research utility and clinical translation of the model require measures that are keyed to the model. The Measures Development Workgroup of HiTOP is developing both questionnaire and interview methods that (...

The factor structure of Personality Disorder (PD) criteria has long been debated, but due to previous heterogenous findings, a common structure to represent covariation among DSM-IV/DSM-5 Section II PD criteria remains an open question. This study integrated a total of N = 30,545 PD assessments from 25 samples to conduct an individual participant m...

The time between adolescence and adulthood is a transformative period of development. During these years, youth are exploring work, relationships, and worldviews while gaining the capacities needed to take on adult roles. These social and psychological processes are reflected in how personality develops across this period. Most youth personality de...

Personality pathology is increasingly conceptualized within hierarchical, dimensional trait models. The Comprehensive Assessment of Traits Relevant to Personality Disorders (CAT-PD) is a pathological-trait measure with potential to improve on currently prevailing instruments because it has wider content coverage; however, its domain-level structure...

The expression of personality pathology differs between people and within a person in day-to-day life. Personality pathology may reflect, in part, dysregulation in basic behavioral processes. Thus, a useful approach for studying maladaptive trait expression comes from literature on stress and daily hassles, which provides dynamic accounts for the r...

We reply to Wright et al.’s (2023) commentary and suggestion that personality trait models would be the preferred way to reconfigure the personality disorders (PDs). Though we agree that personality trait models are powerful descriptive tools, we highlight that they lack definitional or explanatory power, and that is why they have not been able to...

Establishing maladaptive personality traits at a younger age in a developmentally appropriate and clinically tangible way may alert clinicians to dysfunction earlier, and thus reduce the risk of significant impairment later in life. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) Alternative Model for Personal...

Historically, researchers have proposed higher-order factors to explicate the structure of psychopathology, including Externalizing, Internalizing, Fear, Distress, Thought Disorder, and a general factor. Despite extensive research in this domain, the underlying structure of psychopathology remains unresolved. Here, we examine several issues in adju...

Age and gender differences in narcissism have been studied often. However, considering the rich history of narcissism research accompanied by its diverging conceptualizations, little is known about age and gender differences across various narcissism measures. The present study investigated age and gender differences and their interactions across e...

Background A growing literature documents associations between lower trait empathy and heavier alcohol use and more alcohol problems in adolescent and young adult samples. Prior work linking empathy and alcohol use/problems in these populations has thus far focused on trait rather than state empathy, and researchers often do not differentiate betwe...

Individuals differ markedly in how they experience the ebb and flow of emotions. In this study, we used daily experience sampling to examine whether these differences reflect the nature and presence of mood disorders or whether they can better be characterized as distinct dynamic emotion profiles that cut-across diagnostic boundaries. We followed 1...

Theoretical accounts of narcissism emphasize dynamic shifting of self-states in response to social feedback. Status threats are thought to set narcissism’s dynamics in motion. Naturalistic ecological momentary assessment studies have characterized dynamics of narcissistic grandiosity and vulnerability in relation to perceptions of the interpersonal...

Theoretical accounts of psychopathology often emphasize social context as etiologically centralto psychological dysfunction, and interpersonal impairments are widely implicated for many legacy diagnostic categories that span domains of psychopathology (e.g., affective, personality, thought disorders). Contemporary Integrative Interpersonal Theory (...

Personality and social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills are closely related and independently predict life outcomes. This implies that although tightly connected, what a person tends to do (personality traits) and what they are capable of doing (skills) are not always perfectly aligned. In this study, we investigated whether matches and mism...

The time between adolescence and adulthood is a transformative period of development. During these years, youth are exploring work, relationships, and worldviews while gaining the capacities needed to take on adult roles. These social and psychological processes are reflected in how personality develops across this period. Most youth personality de...

Quantitative, empirical approaches to establishing the structure of psychopathology hold promise to improve on traditional psychiatric classification systems. The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) is a framework that summarizes the substantial and growing body of quantitative evidence on the structure of psychopathology. To achieve i...

Affective and interpersonal features of psychopathy are considered hallmarks of the disorder. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA), well-suited to examine dynamic processes in day-to-day life, has not been used to study how psychopathy influences emotional experiences and interpersonal behavior. This preregistered study examined how psychopathy re...

Influential psychological theories hypothesize that people consume alcohol in response to the experience of both negative and positive emotions. Despite two decades of daily diary and ecological momentary assessment research, it remains unclear whether people consume more alcohol on days they experience higher negative and positive affect in everyd...

Background: There is strong evidence for an enduring suicidal diathesis among individuals with a history of suicide attempts, particularly among people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). However, the progression of suicidal crises among people predisposed to suicidal behavior remains poorly understood. Methods: Via multilevel...

Age and gender differences in narcissism have been studied often. However, considering the rich history of narcissism research accompanied by its diverging conceptualizations, little is known about age and gender differences across various narcissism measures. The present study investigated age and gender differences and their interactions across e...

Objective: Interpersonal and emotional functioning are closely linked, and reciprocally influence one another. Contemporary Integrative Interpersonal Theory (CIIT) offers a useful framework to study these patterns. Stress processes offer several candidate targets for empirical investigation with methods that allow for fine-grained analyses in the c...

Interpersonal theory organizes social behavior along dominant (vs. submissive) and warm (vs. cold) dimensions. There is a growing interest in assessing these behaviors in naturalistic settings to maximize ecological validity and to study dynamic social processes. Studies that have assessed interpersonal behavior in daily life have primarily relied...

To gain social status, humans employ two strategies, rivalry and admiration-seeking, and these strategies are over-expressed in trait narcissism, according to the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept (NARC) and the Status Pursuit in Narcissism (SPIN) model. Whether one engages in rivalry or admiration-seeking behaviors is thought to depend o...

Over the past 20 years, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) has become a vital part of the methods repertoire used to study personality pathology. This is because EMA facilitates modeling (dys)function consistent with clinical theory as an ensemble of contextualized dynamic within-person processes, such as when and how relevant socio-affective re...

Influential psychological theories hypothesize that people consume alcohol in response to the experience of both negative and positive emotions. Despite two decades of daily diary and ecological momentary assessment research, it remains unclear whether people consume more alcohol on days they experience higher negative and positive affect in everyd...

Previous studies demonstrate a link between irritability and suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) in youth samples. However, they have mostly assessed irritability in community samples and as a largely dispositional (i.e., trait-like) construct. Thus, it remains unclear to what extent links between irritability and STBs reflect within-person proc...

Personality disorders (PDs) are among the most common and severe classes of psychopathol-ogy. From a clinical perspective, it is challenging to help individuals with personality disorders because treatment ruptures, discontinuation, reversals, and failures are relatively common. An additional clinical challenge is that the model used to diagnose pe...

The accumulation of day-to-day stressors can impact mental and physical health. How people respond to stressful events is a key mechanism responsible for the effects of stress, and individual differences in stress responses can either perpetuate or prevent negative consequences. Most research on daily stress processes has focused on affective respo...

Factor analytic models of common mental disorders have been hypothesized to be affected by various methodological features, which could undermine the assumption that Internalizing and Externalizing reflect part of the natural structure of psychopathology. In this study, we addressed this issue by testing whether and how methodological features affe...

Historically, researchers have proposed higher-order factors to explicate the structure of psychopathology, including Externalizing, Internalizing, Fear, Distress, Thought Disorder, and a general factor. Despite extensive research in this domain, the underlying structure of psychopathology remains unresolved. Herein, we examine several issues in ad...

Despite enthusiasm for using intensive longitudinal designs to measure day-to-day manifestations of personality underlying differences between people, the validity of personality state scales has yet to be established. In this study, we evaluated the psychometrics of 20-item and 10-item daily, Big Five personality state scales in three independent...

To gain social status humans employ two strategies: rivalry and admiration-seeking, and these strategies are over-expressed in trait narcissism, according to the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept (NARC) and the Status Pursuit in Narcissism (SPIN) model. Whether one engages in rivalry or admiration-seeking behaviors is thought to depend on...

Humans adapt to a dynamic environment while maintaining psychological equilibrium. Systems theories of personality hold that generalized processes control stability by regulating how strongly a person reacts to various situations. Research shows there are higher order traits of general personality function (stability) and dysfunction (general perso...

The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project's success rests on the assumption that constructs and data can be integrated across units of analysis and developmental stages. We adopted a psychoneurometric approach to establish biobehavioral liability models of sensitivity to social threat, a key component of potential threat that is particularly sali...

The predominant focus in attachment research on trait-like individual differences has overshadowed investigation of the ways in which working models of attachment represent dynamic, interpersonally responsive socio-affective systems. Intensive longitudinal designs extend previous work by evaluating to what extent attachment varies over social inter...

Interpersonal theory organizes social behavior along dominant (vs. submissive) and warm (vs. cold) dimensions. There is a growing interest in assessing these behaviors in naturalistic settings to maximize ecological validity and to study dynamic social processes. Studies that have assessed interpersonal behavior in daily life have primarily relied...

Background Previous research suggests that there is a bidirectional relationship between incidental affect (i.e., how people feel in day-to-day life) and physical activity behavior. However, many inconsistencies exist in the body of work due to the lag interval between affect and physical activity measurements. Purpose Using a novel continuous-tim...

Widiger and Hines raise a number of significant concerns with the alternative model of personality disorders (AMPD). This places the major class of psychiatric difficulties represented by the personality disorders in a precarious position because the model used in previous editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and cu...

The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) has emerged out of the quantitative approach to psychiatric nosology. This approach identifies psychopathology constructs based on patterns of co-variation among signs and symptoms. The initial HiTOP model, which was published in 2017, is based on a large literature that spans decades of research...

Emotional and behavioral variability are unifying characteristics of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Ambulatory assessment (AA) has been used to quantify this variability in terms of the categorical BPD diagnosis, but evidence suggests that BPD instead reflects general personality pathology. This study aimed to clarify the conceptualization...

Personality disorders are among the most common and severe classes of psychopathology. From a clinical perspective, it is challenging to help individuals with personality disorders because treatment ruptures, discontinuation, reversals, and failures are relatively common. An additional clinical challenge is that the model used to diagnose personali...

Loneliness is a potent psychosocial stressor that predicts poor health and mortality among older adults, possibly in part by accelerating age-related declines in immunocompetence. Mindfulness interventions have shown promise for reducing loneliness and improving markers of physical health. In a sample of lonely older adults, this two-arm parallel t...

There is general agreement that personality pathology has its roots in childhood and adolescence, though little is known about the manifestation of maladaptive personality traits in the daily lives of youth. The DSM-5 Alternative Model for Personality Disorders (AMPD) provides a set of traits useful for organizing behavioral and experiential patter...

Using network methods to analyze multivariate psychological data on symptoms or beliefs has become popular, and numerous tutorials and primers provide detailed guides. However, these guides make such methods appear artificially robust because they often fail to adequately review serious critiques of psychometric network analysis. We briefly review...

This annotated bibliography contains published critiques of methods for constructing and analyzing psychometric networks. We use the term `psychometric network' broadly to include networks in which the nodes are psychological variables (e.g., symptoms, beliefs, traits, etc.) and the edges are their statistical associations estimated from empirical...

Factor analytic models of common mental disorders may be affected by various methodological choices, which could undermine the assumption that Internalizing and Externalizing reflect the natural structure of psychopathology. In this study, we addressed this issue by testing whether and how methodological choices affect the empirical structure of ps...