Traits Are Dynamic

There has long been opposition to conceptualizing personality disorders as maladaptive variants of the 5-factor model. The debate though is now shifting away from the coverage of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Section II personality disorders to the coverage of moment-to-moment contingencies within everyday life. Miskewicz et al. (2022) reported that trait models do account well for the intensity of triggers and the symptomatic response to these triggers but not for the contingency of the symptoms on the triggers. However, there are fundamental conceptual, methodological, and empirical problems that should question its apparent critique of the 5-factor model of personality disorder.