
Colin G DeyoungUniversity of Minnesota | UMN · Department of Psychology
Colin G Deyoung
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216
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Introduction
Publications
Publications (216)
Many psychiatric disorders and associated psychopathology dimensions are related to social cognitive deficits and reduced general cognitive ability. The current study applied a hierarchical, dimensional approach to better understand associations among psychopathology, social cognition, and general cognitive ability. Data were collected from two sam...
Linking neurobiology to relatively stable individual differences in cognition, emotion, motivation, and behavior can require large sample sizes to yield replicable results. Given the nature of between-person research, sample sizes at least in the hundreds are likely to be necessary in most neuroimaging studies of individual differences, regardless...
Understanding the neurobiological mechanisms involved in psychopathology has been hindered by the limitations of categorical nosologies. The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) is an alternative dimensional system for characterizing psychopathology, derived from quantitative studies of covariation among diagnoses and symptoms. HiTOP pr...
A growing understanding of the nature of brain function has led to increased interest in interpreting the properties of large-scale brain networks. Methodological advances in network neuroscience provide means to decompose these networks into smaller functional communities and measure how they reconfigure over time as an index of their dynamic and...
Much of the research on the neural correlates of creativity has emphasized creative cognition, and growing evidence suggests that creativity is related to functional properties of the default and frontoparietal control networks. The present work expands on this body of evidence by testing associations of creative achievement with connectivity profi...
Objective and Background
The goals of this project were to improve our understanding of chronic regulatory focus constructs and to provide researchers with a measure that adequately assesses the constructs, can distinguish individual differences effectively across the range of the constructs, and is appropriate for use in diverse populations.
Meth...
Linking neurobiology to relatively stable individual differences in cognition, emotion, motivation, and behavior can require large sample sizes to yield replicable results. Given the nature of between-person research, sample sizes at least in the hundreds are likely to be necessary in most neuroimaging studies of individual differences, regardless...
Previous research investigating relations between general intelligence and graph-theoretical properties of the brain’s intrinsic functional network has yielded contradictory results. A promising approach to tackle such mixed findings is multi-center analysis. For this study, we analyzed data from four independent data sets (total N > 2000) to ident...
Growing understanding of the nature of brain function has led to increased interest in interpreting the properties of large-scale brain networks. Methodological advances in network neuroscience provide means to decompose these networks into smaller functional communities and measure how they reconfigure over time as an index of their dynamic and fl...
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...
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is widely used to investigate functional coupling (FC) disturbances in a range of clinical disorders. Most analyses performed to date have used group-based parcellations for defining regions of interest (ROIs), in which a single parcellation is applied to each brain. This approach neglects individual dif...
We study the role of attention and working memory in choices where options are presented sequentially rather than simultaneously. We build a model where a costly attention effort is chosen, which can vary over time. Evidence is accumulated proportionally to this effort and the utility of the reward. Crucially, the evidence accumulated decays over t...
Previous research investigating relations between general intelligence and graph-theoretical properties of the brain's intrinsic functional network has yielded contradictory results. A promising approach to tackle such mixed findings is multi-center analysis. For this study, we analyzed data from four independent data sets (total N > 2000) to ident...
Our capacity to measure diverse aspects of human biology has developed rapidly in the past decades, but the rate at which these techniques have generated insights into the biological correlates of psychopathology has lagged far behind. The slow progress is partly due to the poor sensitivity, specificity and replicability of many findings in the lit...
Understanding the neurobiological systems involved in psychopathology has been hindered by the limitations of categorical nosologies, spurring the development of alternative dimensional systems for characterizing psychopathology. The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) is one such system, derived from quantitative studies of covariatio...
Conscientiousness, and related constructs impulsivity and self-control, have been related to structural and functional properties of regions in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and anterior insula. Network-based conceptions of brain function suggest that these regions belong to a single large-scale network, labeled the salience/ventral attention network...
Explicitly or implicitly, psychopathology is often defined in terms of statistical deviance, requiring that an affected individual be sufficiently distant from the norm in some dimension of psychological or neural function. In recent decades, the dominant paradigm in psychiatric research has focused primarily on deviance in neural function, treatin...
We applied structural equation modeling to genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of the items in a Neuroticism questionnaire. We categorized significant genetic variants as acting either through the Neuroticism general factor, through other factors measured by the questionnaire, or through paths independent of any factor. Bioinformatic analysis sh...
Previous research has investigated the nature of imagination as a construct related to multiple forms of higher-order cognition. Despite the emergence of various conceptualizations of imagination, few attempts have been made to explore the structure of imagination as a trait in the context of existing hierarchically-nested personality dimensions. W...
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...
The construct validity of group factor models of personality, which are typically derived from factor analysis of questionnaire items, relies on the ability of each factor to predict meaningful and differentiated real-world outcomes. In a sample of 481 participants, we used the Big Five Aspect Scales (BFAS) personality questionnaire, two laboratory...
Few tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) studies have investigated the relations between intelligence and white matter microstructure in healthy (young) adults, and those have yielded mixed observations, yet white matter is fundamental for efficient and accurate information transfer throughout the human brain. We used a multicenter approach to ide...
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is widely used to investigate functional coupling (FC) disturbances in a range of clinical disorders. Most analyses performed to date have used group-based parcellations for defining regions of interest (ROIs), in which a single parcellation is applied to each brain. This approach neglects individual dif...
The idea that what is intrinsically good for people must be something they want or care about is a compelling one. Goal-fulfillment theories of well-being, which make this idea their central tenet, have a lot going for them. They offer a good explanation of why we tend to be motivated to pursue what’s good for us, and they seem to best explain how...
Previous research has made use of sensory discrimination tasks that incorporate differential reinforcement schedules as a method for measuring individual differences in implicit reward learning. One such task was popularized by Pizzagalli and colleagues (2005) with the intent of behaviorally assessing anhedonia and reward sensitivity. Various studi...
Background: Social cognitive deficits are prominent across several dimensions of psychopathology that compose a variety of psychiatric diagnoses. The hierarchical structure of the dimensions of psychopathology appears related to general cognitive ability (GCA). Yet, the exact relations among social cognition, GCA, and psychopathology dimensions rem...
Objective:
According to Cybernetic Big Five Theory (CB5T), personality traits reflect variation in the parameters of evolved cybernetic mechanisms, and extreme manifestations of these traits correspond to a risk for psychopathology because they threaten the organism's ability to pursue its goals effectively. Our theory of autism as a consequence o...
Personality neuroscience is the study of persistent psychological individual differences, typically in the general population, using neuroscientific methods. It has the potential to shed light on the neurobiological mechanisms underlying individual differences and their manifestation in ongoing behavior and experience. The field was inaugurated man...
Objective:
The causes of substance use disorders (SUDs) are largely unknown and the effectiveness of their treatments is limited. One crucial impediment to research and treatment progress surrounds how SUDs are classified and diagnosed. Given the substantial heterogeneity among individuals diagnosed with a given SUD (e.g., alcohol use disorder [AU...
Obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) are common in school-aged children and predict the development of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). White-matter abnormalities have been described in OCD, but the white matter correlates of OCS in the developing brain are unclear. Some correlates of OCS (or a diagnosis of OCD) may reflect correlates of a trans...
Objective: The causes of substance use disorders (SUDs) are largely unknown and the effectiveness of their treatments is limited. One crucial impediment to research and treatment progress surrounds how SUDs are classified and diagnosed. Given the substantial heterogeneity among individuals diagnosed with a given SUD (e.g., alcohol use disorder), id...
Personality psychology seeks to understand not only individuals’ dispositional traits, but also other components of personality, including self-defining life narratives. Past studies linking traits to narrative themes have largely focused on the Big Five. In the present study, 219 U.S. undergraduates completed the Big Five Aspect Scales, which meas...
We used multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) modeling to examine general factors of psychopathology in three samples of youths ( Ns = 2,119, 303, and 592) for whom three informants reported on the youth’s psychopathology (e.g., child, parent, teacher). Empirical support for the p-factor diminished in multi-informant models compared with mono-informant mod...
Marek et al. analyzed three very large magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) datasets and concluded that thousands of participants are necessary to ensure replicable results in “brain-wide associations studies,” which they defined as “studies of the associations between common inter-individual variability in human brain structure/function and cognition...
Previous research in the field of personality neuroscience has identified associations of conscientiousness and related constructs like impulsivity and self-control with structural and functional properties of particular regions in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and insula. Network-based conceptions of brain function suggest that these regions probabl...
Previous research in the field of personality neuroscience has identified associations of conscientiousness and related constructs like impulsivity and self-control with structural and functional properties of particular regions in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and insula. Network-based conceptions of brain function suggest that these regions probabl...
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...
Value Fulfillment Theory (VFT) is a philosophical theory of well-being. Cybernetic Big Five Theory (CB5T) is a psychological theory of personality. Both start with a conception of the person as a goal-seeking (or value-pursuing) organism, and both take goals and the psychological integration of goals to be key to well-being. By joining VFT and CB5T...
Previous research has investigated the nature of imagination as a construct related to multiple forms of higher-order cognition. Despite the emergence of various conceptualizations of imagination, few attempts have been made to explore the structure of imagination as a trait in the context of existing hierarchically-nested personality dimensions. W...
The opportunity to learn new knowledge is ever present. How do people decide if information has sufficient value to counteract the cost of obtaining it? We proposed a conceptual model of information seeking that emphasizes how personality traits and perceptions of situations may influence motivations to seek information to explore (related to trait...
This commentary discusses questions and misconceptions about HiTOP raised by Haeffel et al. (2021). We explain what the system classifies and why it is descriptive and atheoretical, highlighting benefits and limitations of this approach. We clarify why the system is organized according to patterns of covariation or comorbidity among signs and sympt...
In this commentary, we discuss questions and misconceptions about the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) raised by Haeffel et al. We explain what the system classifies and why it is descriptive and atheoretical, and we highlight benefits and limitations of this approach. We clarify why the system is organized according to patterns of...
Traditionally, personality has been conceptualized in terms of dimensions of human experience – habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. By contrast, psychopathology has traditionally been conceptualized in terms of categories of disorder – disordered thinking, feeling, and behaving. The empirical literature, however, routinely shows that...
Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to how we identify and understand the mental states of others. ToM abilities vary with dimensions of normal-range personality and can be seriously impaired in a number of mental disorders, particularly those related to the Antagonism domain. The current study used a multi-task design to examine how ToM relates to Agreeab...
Social cognitive processes, such as emotion perception and empathy, allow humans to navigate complex social landscapes and are associated with specific neural systems. In particular, theory of mind (ToM), which refers to our ability to decipher the mental states of others, is related to the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal juncti...
The opportunity to learn new knowledge is ever present. How do people decide if information has sufficient value to counteract the cost of obtaining it? We proposed a conceptual model of information seeking that emphasizes how personality traits and perceptions of situations may influence motivations to seek information to explore (related to trait...
Explicitly or implicitly, psychopathology is often defined in terms of statistical deviance, requiring that an affected individual is sufficiently distant from the norm in some dimension of psychological or neural function. In recent decades, the dominant paradigm in psychiatric research has focused primarily on deviance in neural function, treatin...
We used multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) modeling to examine general factors of psychopathology in three samples of youth (ns = 2119, 303, 592) for whom three informants reported on the youth’s psychopathology (e.g., child, parent, teacher). Empirical support for the p-factor diminished in multi-informant models compared with mono-informant models: th...
Generations of psychologists have been taught that mental disorder can be carved into discrete categories, each qualitatively different from the others and from normality. This model is now outdated. A preponderance of evidence indicates that (a) individual differences in mental health (health vs. illness) are a matter of degree, not kind, and (b)...
The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) and the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) represent major dimensional frameworks proposing two alternative approaches to accelerate progress in the way psychopathology is studied, classified, and treated. RDoC is a research framework rooted in neuroscience aiming to further the understanding of tra...
Traditional diagnostic systems went beyond empirical evidence on the structure of mental health. Consequently, these diagnoses do not depict psychopathology accurately, and their validity in research and utility in clinical practice are therefore limited. The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) consortium proposed a model based on stru...
Shortcomings of approaches to classifying psychopathology based on expert consensus have given rise to contemporary efforts to classify psychopathology quantitatively. In this paper, we review progress in achieving a quantitative and empirical classification of psychopathology. A substantial empirical literature indicates that psychopathology is ge...
Cybernetics is the study of goal-directed systems that self-regulate via feedback, a category that includes human beings. Cybernetic Big Five Theory (CB5T) attempts to explain personality in cybernetic terms, conceptualizing personality traits as manifestations of variation in parameters of the neural mechanisms that evolved to facilitate cyberneti...
Previous research has made use of sensory discrimination tasks that incorporate differential reinforcement schedules as a method for measuring individual differences in implicit reward learning. One such task utilizing a differential reinforcement schedule was popularized by Pizzagalli et al. (2005) with the intent of behaviorally assessing anhedon...
Objective
The present study estimates associations of the Big Five domains and their metatraits with individual indicators of eudaimonic, hedonic, and social well‐being, as well as broader factors that capture the tendency for these individual indicators to correlate.
Method
Using data from a large sample of adults from the U.S., confirmatory fact...
Coping styles (CS) reflect individuals' habitual use of strategies for coping with negative events in daily life. Although the research into coping has not reached a consistent agreement about classifying coping strategies as either inherently adaptive or maladaptive, the influence of maladaptive CS on mental health is noticeable. We hypothesized t...
Recently, increasing efforts have been made to define and measure dimensional phenotypes associated with psychiatric disorders. One example is a probabilistic reward task developed by Pizzagalli et al. (2005) to assess anhedonia, by measuring response to a differential reinforcement schedule. This task has been used in many studies, which have conn...
In this commentary, we argue that Fried's article, "Lack of theory building and testing impedes progress in the factor and network literature," provides a number of insights that will be very useful for psychologists, but also that he is wishing for psychology to focus on a kind of theory that it cannot generally be expected to produce at this time...
Cybernetics is the study of goal-directed systems that self-regulate via feedback, a category that includes human beings. Cybernetic Big Five Theory (CB5T) attempts to explain personality in cybernetic terms, conceptualizing personality traits as manifestations of variation in parameters of the neural mechanisms that evolved to facilitate cyberneti...
The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) is an empirically and quantitatively derived dimensional classification system designed to describe the features of psychopathology and, ultimately, to replace categorical nosologies. Among the constructs that HiTOP organizes are "symptom components" and "maladaptive traits," but past HiTOP publi...
The present study: (1) tested whether a structure of common mental disorders within the hierarchical taxonomy of psychopathology was invariant from late childhood to adolescence in a sample of Mexican-origin youth, (2) examined the developmental course of psychopathology at different levels of the hierarchy, and (3) tested the degree to which chang...
Over the last few decades, most personality psychology research has been focused on assessing personality via scores on a few broad traits and investigating how these scores predict various behaviors and outcomes. This approach does not seek to explain the causal mechanisms underlying human personality and thus falls short of explaining the proxima...
Background: Social cognitive processes such as emotion perception and empathy allow humans to navigate complex social landscapes and are associated with specific neural systems. In particular, theory of mind (ToM), which refers to our ability to decipher the mental states of others, is related to the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex and temporoparie...
The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) and the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) represent major dimensional frameworks proposing two alternative approaches to accelerate progress in the way psychopathology is studied, classified, and treated. RDoC is a research framework rooted in neuroscience aiming to further the understanding of tra...
Personality factors have been associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and dementia, but they have not been examined against markers of regional brain glucose metabolism (a primary measure of brain functioning) in older adults without clinically diagnosed cognitive impairment. The relationship between personality factors derived from the five-facto...
Background
Positive symptoms of schizophrenia and its extended phenotype—schizotypy—are characterized by the inclusion of novel, erroneous mental contents. These positive symptoms occur across those with a variety of diagnoses, including schizophrenia, personality disorders, and depression and bipolar with psychotic features. One promising transdia...
Background
Generalization of conditioned-fear, a core feature of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), has been the focus of several recent neuroimaging studies. A striking outcome of these studies is the frequency with which neural correlates of generalization fall within hubs of well-established functional networks including salience (SN), centr...
Positive symptoms of schizophrenia and its extended phenotype—often termed Psychoticism or positive schizotypy—are characterized by the inclusion of novel, erroneous mental contents. One promising framework for explaining positive symptoms involves “apophenia,” conceptualized here as a disposition toward false positive errors. Apophenia and positiv...
The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) is an empirical structural model of psychological symptoms formulated to improve the reliability and validity of clinical assessment. Neurobiology can inform assessments of early risk and intervention strategies, and the HiTOP model has greater potential to interface with neurobiological measures...
This chapter reviews conceptual and empirical work that attempts to establish the relation of intelligence to personality. It first offers a summary and critique of three dichotomies often used to distinguish intelligence from personality conceptually and then reviews empirical research on the relation of intelligence to a wide range of personality...
Genetic discovery in psychiatry and clinical psychology is hindered by suboptimal phenotypic definitions. We argue that the hierarchical, dimensional, and data-driven classification system proposed by the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) consortium provides a more effective approach to identifying genes that underlie mental disorder...
Longitudinal studies have shown that, on average, agreeableness and conscientiousness increase and neuroticism decreases in adulthood, a phenomenon dubbed the “maturity principle”. The rank-order stability of personality also tends to increase with age, sometimes called the “cumulative continuity principle”. It remains unclear, however, whether the...
Recently, increasing efforts have been made to define and measure dimensional phenotypes associated with psychiatric disorders. One example is an implicit reward learning task developed by Pizzagalli et al. (2005) to assess anhedonia, by measuring participants’ responses to a differential reinforcement schedule. This task has been used in many stud...
Hierarchical, quantitative models of psychopathology focus primarily on higher-order constructs, whereas less is known
about the structure and content comprising lower-order dimensions of psychopathology. Here, we address this gap in the
literature by using targeted factor analysis to integrate the 25 maladaptive facet-level traits of the Personali...
The aims of the present study were as follows: (1) Using a large sample of adults, estimate overlap between social-relational exposures measured at midlife and well-being measured at midlife and approximately 9-years later. (2) Using a subsample of twins, test for heritable variation in social-relational exposures, and (3) controlling for heritable...
Psychosis proneness has been linked to heightened Openness to Experience and to cognitive deficits. Openness and psychotic disorders are associated with the default and frontoparietal networks, and the latter network is also robustly associated with intelligence. We tested the hypothesis that functional connectivity of the default and frontoparieta...
Psychosis proneness appears to fall on a continuum with Openness to Experience, and both traits are associated with individual differences in the default and frontoparietal networks. The latter of these networks is also robustly associated with intelligence. We tested the hypothesis that functional connectivity of the default and frontoparietal net...
Social cognition refers to the ability to perceive and manipulate information regarding the emotional and mental states of others. Social cognitive ability is correlated positively with most Agreeableness-related traits (e.g., compassion) and negatively with their pathologically-low variants (e.g., callousness and aggression). Preliminary evidence...
The categorical model of personality disorder classification in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed. [DSM–5]; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) is highly and fundamentally problematic. Proposed for DSM–5 and provided within Section III (for Emerging Measures and Models) was the...