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Personality Disorders, Maladaptive Personality Traits, and Sleep Problems: Findings and Future Directions

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Sleep, Personality, and Social Behavior

Abstract

Early studies on personality disorder and sleep first documented important differences in several polysomnographic sleep parameters between patients with personality disorder and controls, indicating that patients with personality disorders display irregular sleep. However, early studies were limited in several areas, with two primary limitations being small sample sizes, which limited study power, and a categorical approach to the assessment of personality disorder, which limited specific information that could be gained about the relationships between personality disorder and sleep. The present chapter summarizes the research literature on personality disorder and sleep from the perspective of polysomnographic versus self-reported sleep assessments and traditional DSM-category versus modern dimensional maladaptive personality trait assessments. Associations between dimensional maladaptive personality traits and sleep provide more specific information than DSM categories about the links between personality disorder and sleep. Newer studies are employing larger samples sometimes including ambulatory and longitudinal methodologies that provide higher-powered answers to research questions about disrupted sleep in personality disorders. Implementation of these methodologies, as well as the assessment of more specific maladaptive personality traits and the rise of transparent research practices aimed at increasing the reproducibility of results, provide promise for our increased understanding of personality disorder and sleep in the future.

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  1. University of Kentucky Internship Consortium, Lexington, KY, USA

    Joshua R. Oltmanns

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  1. Department of Psychology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

    Zlatan Križan

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Oltmanns, J.R. (2019). Personality Disorders, Maladaptive Personality Traits, and Sleep Problems: Findings and Future Directions. In: Križan, Z. (eds) Sleep, Personality, and Social Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30628-1_13

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