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The Development of the General Factor of Psychopathology ‘p Factor’ Through Childhood and Adolescence

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Abstract

Recent studies have suggested that the structure of psychopathology may be usefully represented in terms of a general factor of psychopathology (p-factor) capturing variance common to a broad range of symptoms transcending diagnostic domains in addition to specific factors capturing variance common to smaller subsets of more closely related symptoms. Little is known about how the general co-morbidity captured by this p-factor develops and whether general co-morbidity increases or decreases over childhood and adolescence. We evaluated two competing hypotheses: 1) dynamic mutualism which predicts growth in general co-morbidity and associated p-factor strength over time and 2) p-differentiation which predicts that manifestations of liabilities towards psychopathology become increasingly specific over time. Data came from the Zurich Project on the Social Development of Children and Youths (z-proso), a longitudinal study of a normative sample (approx. 50 % male) measured at 8 time points from ages 7 to 15. We operationalised general co-morbidity as p-factor strength in a bi-factor model and used omega hierarchical to track how this changed over development. In contrast to the predictions of both dynamic mutualism and p-differentiation, p-factor strength remained relatively constant over the studied period suggesting that such processes do not govern the interplay between psychopathological symptoms during this phase of development. Future research should focus on earlier phases of development and on factors that maintain the consistency of symptom-general covariation across this period.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the children, parents and teachers who provided data for the z-proso study and the research assistants involved in its collection. Funding from the Jacobs the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health is also gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Violence Research Centre, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB3 9DA, UK

    Aja Louise Murray & Manuel Eisner

  2. Criminological Research Unit, Chair of Sociology, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland

    Denis Ribeaud

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  1. Aja Louise Murray
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Correspondence to Aja Louise Murray.

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Funding

This study received funding from the Jacobs Foundation (Grant 2010-888) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grants 100013_116829 & 100014_132124).

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Aja Louise Murray declares that she has no conflict of interest. Manuel Eisner declares that he has no conflict of interest. Denis Ribeaud declares that he has no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Murray, A.L., Eisner, M. & Ribeaud, D. The Development of the General Factor of Psychopathology ‘p Factor’ Through Childhood and Adolescence. J Abnorm Child Psychol 44, 1573–1586 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-016-0132-1

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