A COMPARISON OF TRIDIMENSIONAL PERSONALITY QUESTIONNAIRE DIMENSIONS IN BIPOLAR DISORDER AND UNIPOLAR DEPRESSION

The harm avoidance (HA) personality dimension has been hypothesized to be a vulnerability factor for unipolar depression (UD) but not for bi polar disorder (ED). The reported difference on HA scores between thes e diagnostic groups may have been compromised by the assessment of ED patients who had not fully recovered. To test the diagnostic specifici ty of elevated HA scores and to elucidate whether assumptions about di fferences between patients with UD or ED might be attributed to the li ngering effects of mood state, the Tridimensional Personality Question naire (TPQ) was administered to recovered patients with either ED or U D and a nonpatient comparison group. Both patient groups scored higher on the HA dimension than the nonpatient comparison group, but the pat ient groups did not differ from one another on this diension. Moreover , novelty seeking (NS) scores were elevated in subjects with ED compar ed with both UD patients and nonpatient subjects. These results sugges t that high HA scores may be associated with a mood disorder diagnosis , whereas high NS scores may be associated with the ED subtype.