Relational Aggression, the FFM, and Personality Disorders

This video answers the question: What is the relationship between relational aggression and personality disorders? When we talk about relational aggression, we're talking about behaviors that are intended to damage interpersonal relationships and social status. Individuals who are relationally aggressive cause damage to other people, but relational aggression also has negative consequences for the aggressor. Individuals who perpetrate relational aggression have a higher risk of mental disorders including personality disorders, difficulty in school, and peer rejection. We also see with relational aggression that it is a consistent pattern of behavior. It's an interactional style that doesn't appear to be isolated and discrete, but rather consistent and stable. It also tends to develop early in life, in late childhood, or early adolescence and it's associated with interpersonal instability and jealousy. With this understanding of relational aggression, it's easy to see a connection specifically to personality disorders and even more specifically to Cluster B personality disorders: antisocial, borderline, narcissistic, and histrionic. Cluster B is considered the emotional, dramatic, and erratic cluster. Prior studies have shown an association with all of those personality disorders in cluster B, but particularly with antisocial personality disorder. Overall, there's not a lot of research on relational aggression and personality disorders. One way to study these constructs is with the five-factor model of personality. The five-factor model has five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. We can remember the five factor model traits through the acronym OCEAN.

Reardon, K. W., Tackett, J. L., & Lynam, D. (2018). The personality context of relational aggression: A Five-Factor Model profile analysis. Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 9(3), 228-238. doi:10.1037/per0000231