DIMENSIONAL ASSESSMENT OF PERSONALITY IN AN OUTPATIENT SAMPLE - RELATIONS OF THE SYSTEMS OF MILLON AND CLONINGER

The Cloninger Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) and the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI-II) are both self-report inventor ies that can be used to assess per sonality reliably in clinical sampl es. Both instruments were administered to 103 consecutive psychiatric out-patients with or without personality disorders. The goals were to assess the convergent validity of the two instruments, to replicate th e findings of Svrakic et al. (1993) Archives of General Psychiatry, 50 , 991-999, about the differential diagnosis of Axis II disorders, and to analyse the relations of. Millon's measures of Axis 1 disorders wit h Cloninger's measures. We observed a strong convergent validity betwe en the instruments; the seven dimensions of the TCI accounted for most of the variance in MCMI-II measures of both Axis 1 and Axis 2 disorde rs. As reported by Svrakic et al. (1993) Archives of General Psychiatr y, 50, 991-999, in in-patients, low self-directedness and low cooperat iveness were confirmed to be the essential features of all personality disorders in outpatients. In addition, self-transcendence, the third of Cloninger's character dimensions, was observed to be a strong corre late of severe Axis-1 psychopathology, including manic and delusional disorders. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.