Abstract
Emotion dysregulation is a transdiagnostic phenomenon. In evidence-based treatments for disorders involving emotion dysregulation, there are still many who do not achieve clinically significant gains. The primary goal of the present study was to examine the effect of personality on treatment outcomes in individuals experiencing symptoms of emotion dysregulation. Participants were involved in a randomized control trial, where they participated in one of two group therapy programs, dialectical behavioural therapy or positive psychotherapy (PPT). Hierarchical regressions were performed to examine the main effects and interactive effects predicting change in emotion dysregulation, depression, and anxiety across the course of treatment. Split group analyses were conducted to examine the main effects of personality on treatment outcomes, differentiated by treatment group. None of the individual personality traits reached a level of significance to predict treatment outcomes after controlling for baseline symptom severity. However, large effect sizes were observed suggesting personality may have moderated specific treatment effects within the individual types of treatment. For participants undergoing dialectical behaviour therapy, higher conscientiousness and higher neuroticism predicted improved depressive symptoms. Conversely, for participants undergoing PPT, lower neuroticism and lower conscientiousness predicted improved emotion dysregulation. Extraversion predicted better outcomes across both groups. Results suggest that certain treatment types could be more beneficial for people with certain personality profiles.
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Notes
Original aims/hypotheses for this project included interactions between personality traits predicting outcome across both treatment groups. This section has been added as supplemental materials and is not discussed further due to brevity concerns.
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Uliaszek and Rashid conceptualized the primary study and ran the interventions. Dr. Uliaszek collected and prepared all data. The design of the present study questions and all data analyses were performed by Ryan M. Brudner and Amanda A. Uiaszek. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Ryan M. Brudner and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Brudner, R.M., Gulamani, T., Rashid, T. et al. Five-Factor Model Domains as Moderators of Treatment Outcomes in a Transdiagnostic Young Adult Sample. J Contemp Psychother (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10879-024-09618-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10879-024-09618-w