For example, although recognizing the early manifestations of personality disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-Fourth Edition, Test Revision (DSM-IVTR) asserts “the traits of a Personality Disorder that appear in childhood will often not persist unchanged into adult life” (p. One hindrance to this research has been a general opposition to the application of the construct of personality disorder to youth. Despite this presumption, until recently there has been relatively little research into earlier manifestations of the personality disorders. These patterns are relatively stable and of long duration, and presumed to be first evident during childhood or adolescence. Personality disorders refer to patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting (i.e., personality traits) that are inflexible and maladaptive, and that cause significant functional impairment or subjective distress ( American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Implications and future directions are discussed. These results suggest that concerns about large changes in personality pathology across childhood and adolescence may be overstated.
In general, juvenile psychopathy could be reliably assessed beginning in childhood, was fairly stable across short and long intervals, showed little mean-level fluctuation, and predicted delinquency across adolescence. If adolescent development contributes to instability in personality pathology, large age-related fluctuations in reliability, stability, and predictive utility should be observed, particularly in the latter part of adolescence when normative changes are hypothesized to influence levels of psychopathy. Using a short form of the Childhood Psychopathy Scale (CPS Lynam, 1997) and mixed models incorporating fixed and random effects, we examined the reliability, individual stability, mean-level stability, and predictive utility of juvenile psychopathy as a function of age (i.e., from 7 years old to 17 years old) in over 1500 boys from the three cohorts of the Pittsburgh Youth Study. The present study examined the stability in personality pathology, specifically psychopathy, across childhood and adolescence. The current diagnostic system suggests that personality disorder categories be applied to children and adolescents in rare circumstances due to expected changes in personality pathology across development.
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