Is There a General Factor of Prevalent Psychopathology during Adulthood?

By Benjamin B. Lahey, Brooks Applegate, J. Hakes, David H. Zald, Ahmad R. Hariri, Paul J. Rathouz. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2012

618 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The patterns of comorbidity among prevalent mental disorders in adults lead them to load on ‘externalizing,’ ‘distress,’ and ‘fears’ factors. These factors are themselves robustly correlated, but little attention has been paid to this fact. As a first step in studying the implications of these inter-factor correlations, confirmatory factor analyses were conducted on diagnoses of 11 prevalent DSM-IV mental disorders in a nationally representative sample. A model specifying correlated externalizing, distress, and fears factors fit well, but an alternative model was tested in which a ‘general’ bifactor was added to capture what these disorders share in common. There was a modest but significant improvement in fit for the bifactor model relative to the 3-factor oblique model, with all disorders loading strongly on the bifactor. Tests of external validity revealed that the fears, distress, and externalizing factors were differentially associated with measures of functioning and potential risk factors. Nonetheless, the general bifactor accounted for significant independent variance in future psychopathology, functioning, and other criteria over and above the fears, distress, and externalizing factors. These findings support the hypothesis that these prevalent forms of psychopathology have both important common and unique features. Future studies should determine if this is because they share elements of their etiology and neurobiological mechanisms. If so, the existence of common features across diverse forms of prevalent psychopathology could have important implications for understanding the nature, etiology, and outcomes of psychopathology.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f9f331a7f27fedec9890549e235b3a5bdc3f23e7

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Citations in the corpus

Riskier Tests of the Validity of the Bifactor Model of Psychopathology (2019, background): “As testament to its popularity, the seminal articles on the p factor and bifactor models of psychopathology (Caspi et al., 2014; Lahey et al., 2012) together have been cited more than 1,100 times.”
The p Factor: One General Psychopathology Factor in the Structure of Psychiatric Disorders? (2014, methodology): “1, Model B), has recently been used to demonstrate the existence of a single General Psychopathology factor in adulthood (Lahey et al., 2012).”
Annual Research Review: On the relations among self-regulation, self-control, executive functioning, effortful control, cognitive control, impulsivity, risk-taking, and inhibition for developmental psychopathology (2016, neutral): “…general or ‘P’ factor, while specific components of psychopathology fit into two or more, correlated, low-level domains in adults (Caspi et al., 2014; Lahey et al., 2012) and in children (Noordhof, Krueger, Ormel, Oldehinkel, & Hartman, 2015) in a bifactor structure.5 These subdomains in turn may…”
All for one and one for all: Mental disorders in one dimension (2018, background): “(23) provided the initial evidence for this model, and subsequently we replicated it and called the general factor “p” (24).”
The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP): A Dimensional Alternative to Traditional Nosologies (2017, neutral): “Moreover, research is beginning to identify specific environmental factors that contribute to the spectra (Caspi et al., 2014; Lahey et al., 2012).”