PERSONALITY-TRAITS AS VULNERABILITY MARKE RS - PROBLEMS OF ASSESSMENT

Personality traits play an increasing role in research on the vulnerab ility to mental disorders. Problems of their assessment are dealt with here with special reference to work of our own in this area. Personal ity inventories for self-rating or informants' rating are appropriate instruments for retrospective as well as prospective investigations. T hey should be short and, at the same time, suites for the assessment o f the main dimensions of personality, the ''Big Five''. The Munich Per sonality Test (MPT) and the Six Factor Test (SFT) serve as examples in this context. They were already successfully applied in clinical and outpatient settings and in ''high-risk'' studies. In retrospective inv estigations, a newly developed method for the operationalized diagnosi s of personality types from case history data can be used as well. On the basis of this approach, we have recently developed a Biographical Personality Interview (BPI) which, in combination with personality inv entories, can be regarded an optimal device for the assessment of prem orbid personality in psychiatric patients.