OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between therapists' emotional responses and patients' personality disorders and level of psychological functioning. METHOD A random national sample of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists (N=203) completed the Therapist Response Questionnaire to identify patterns of therapists' emotional response, and the Shedler-Westen Asses...

Direct, blind interviews were used to study the risk for and prevalence of DSM-III-R Axis I and II disorders in 93 first-degree relatives of outpatients with schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) and outpatients with other personality disorders. Risks for SPD (at a slightly loosened diagnostic threshold) and schizoid personality disorder were significantly higher in the families of probands wi...

Referential thinking is the tendency to view innocuous stimuli as having a specific meaning for the self and is associated with personality traits and disorders. In three studies, this research examined the relations among referential thinking, self-processing, and paranoia. In study 1, follow-up questions on the Referential Thinking Scale (Lenzenweger, Bennett, & Lilenfeld, 1997) revealed that...

This study investigated the replicability of a previously proposed personality typology of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD, and explored stability of cluster membership over a 6-month period. Participants with current PTSD (n = 156) were drawn from the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study (CLPS). The CLPS project tracked a large sample of individuals who met criteria for 1...

Personality disorders are the most common serious mental illness. People suffering from these disorders tend to exhibit emotional patterns and behaviors that seem troubling to the majority of people and are not necessarily explicable by immediate environmental stimuli. Nevertheless, many clinicians are unfamiliar with the most recent research on these disorders and the latest approaches to trea...

Schizotypal personality disorder shares some attenuated phenotypic features with schizophrenia, but represents an independent syndrome. In contrast, prodromal symptoms of schizophrenia represent early warning signs of the impending onset of schizophrenia. Although these constructs are intended to reflect independent syndromes, self-report instruments measuring these constructs assess similar sy...