Chunk #72 — Psychopathology Description and Diagnosis — On the Comprehensiveness, Utility, and Parsimony of Using Homogeneous Constructs to Describe Psychopathology — The comprehensive coverage of psychopathology with description in terms of homogeneous dimensions of dysfunction
That personality description shows that clinicians did not appear to miss the essential elements of what has been thought of as psychopathic dysfunction. Indeed, for each of the three clinical cases in that study, the clinician participants rated the FFM description as superior to the DSM–IV diagnosis with respect to the FFM's capacity to describe all of the client's important personality difficulties (and on dimensions of utility, which we describe below; Samuel & Widiger, 2006). The success of this approach, at least in this study, is in part a function of the existence of comprehensive models of personality that have received extensive validation in the basic science literature (Costa & McCrae, 1995; Digman, 1990) and in the clinical literature (Clark, 2007; Widiger & Samuel, 2005; Widiger & Trull, 2007). When description is done in terms of homogeneous dimensions of functioning, clinicians can take advantage of the extensive validity evidence in the literature.
