Dimensional Models of Personality Diagnosis & Stigma
ActiveA long-running program on how personality pathology is diagnosed — comparing categorical and dimensional (DSM-5 AMPD, ICD-11, HiTOP) approaches and their downstream effects on stigma, clinical utility, and treatment, especially for borderline personality disorder.
The way clinicians diagnose personality disorders — as discrete categories or as positions on continuous trait dimensions — shapes everything downstream: who gets identified, how they are understood, the stigma they face, and the treatment they receive. This program brings together the lab’s work, and a decade of student research teams, on evaluating dimensional models (the DSM-5 Alternative Model for Personality Disorders, the ICD-11, and HiTOP) against the traditional categorical system.
Threads within it include experimental studies of how diagnostic framing and labelling affect clinician and public stigma toward borderline personality disorder, how workplace demands shape practitioners’ openness to dimensional approaches, latent-profile and structural work on whether personality symptoms cluster in clinically meaningful ways, the role of social support and personality dysfunction in distress, and reviews of early, accessible intervention for young people with borderline features. Together they build the evidence base for closing the research-to-clinic gap in dimensional assessment.