Mapping Personality Traits: A Network Approach to Uncovering Personality Inventory for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Brief Form’s Factorial Structure

This study explores the structural properties of the Personality Inventory for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, Brief Form (PID-5-BF) by applying network analysis and com- munity detection as a data-driven alternative to traditional factor models. Traditionally, the PID-5-BF assesses personality traits across five domains—Negative Affectivity, Detachment, Antagonism, Disinhibition, and Psychoticism—but has shown notable inconsistencies in item alignment and factorial coherence. To examine these issues, data were collected from 2,766 Italian participants (71.7% female, 28.3% male, Mage = 32.94 years, SD = 13.2). The estimated network revealed a stable structure, supported by robust centrality measures (closeness = 0.59, expected influence = 0.75, strength = 0.75). Community detection identified five empirically coherent clusters—Disinhibition, Demoralization, Detachment and Irritability, Psychosocial Alienation, and Pathological Egocentrism—suggesting an alternative organization of maladaptive traits in this population. To assess generalizability, a second analysis was conducted on a Hungarian sample (N = 355), yielding a five-structure solution with different item compositions. While the network approach emphasizes item-level associations, the specific configurations varied across samples in ways that reflect contextual influences. Nonetheless, this method offers complementary insights to tradi- tional factorial models, highlighting how personality traits may organize differently across populations and supporting the use of network-based approaches in refining dimensional models of personality pathology.