Self-Informant Agreement on Personality: The Moderating Effects of Depression and/or Anxiety

Abnormalities in positive and negative affectivity are risk factors for the development of psychopathology. Given that mood and anxiety disorder symptoms may influence self-ratings of personality traits, informant-reports of personality (i.e., from family members or close friends) are sometimes also collected. Although some have suggested that informant-reports are less biased by psychopathology than self-reports, little is known about the concordance between self- and informant-reports among those with anxiety and/or depression relative to those without. We investigated whether self-informant agreement on personality differs as a function of whether an individual has major depressive disorder (MDD) with no history of panic disorder (PD; n = 15), PD with no history of MDD (n =21), comorbid PD and MDD (n = 28), or no history of psychopathology (n = 53). Informant-reported positive affectivity (PA) positively predicted self-reported PA among those with MDD, but not among those without. Likewise, informant-reported anxiety sensitivity positively predicted self-reported anxiety sensitivity among those with PD but not among those without. Finally, informant-reported negative affectivity (NA) positively predicted self-reported NA, and this relationship was not moderated by diagnosis. Results may indicate that PA and anxiety sensitivity are more noticeable to informants of those with MDD and PD, respectively. However, all associations between self- and informant-reports were moderate at best, which suggests that informant-reports may still contribute unique information to the assessment of personality and thus should be obtained when possible.