Personality, Social Skills, and Psychopathology: An Individual Differences Approach

This book presents an introduction to the study of relationships among per­ sonality, social skills, and psychopathology. Although research findings dur­ ing the last decade have made it clear that the relationships among these variables are almost always complex and mUltiply determined, many clini­ cians and theoreticians have not incorporated such complexities into their models of human behavior and therapeutic intervention. This discrepancy between clinical theory and research-based findings has been of special con­ cern to us because we have been both empirically oriented academic re­ searchers and practicing clinicians. It is our belief that clinical theory relat­ ed to personality, social skills, and psychopathology can be enriched by re­ search findings from a wide range of fields-from human genetics, tempera­ ment, and personality to family systems, affect, psychophysiology, and learning. This book is divided into an introductory chapter and three sections. The introductory chapter provides an overview of the issues in the field, compares models, and provides suggestions for further integration and ar­ ticulation of concepts related to personality, social skills, and psycho­ pathology. The book's first section presents state-of-the-art general models of interactions among personality, social skills, and psychopathology. Con­ nolly opens this section with a chapter that reviews longitudinal findings in­ dicating that personality traits predict the onset of psychopathology and marital distress. The etiology of these and related findings is the subject of other chapters in this section.