Heterogeneity in the Structure of Aggressive Personality

Aggressiveness is a core feature of many personality disorders. Dozens of dispositional aggressiveness scales exist with their own idiosyncratic factor structures, but they can be distilled down into six factors: Relational, Angry, Violent, Retaliatory, Intimate, and Alcohol. Yet it remains unknown how this comprehensive factor structure might change or remain stable at relatively high levels of aggressiveness — knowledge with considerable relevance to the study of personality pathology. To examine this, I used factor mixture modeling on self-report data from 1,447 diverse undergraduates from a Minority Serving Institution, which combined the person-centered and variable centered approaches of profile and factor analyses. Analyses revealed three latent profiles that were initially characterized by high (~14% of sample), medium (~41%), or low (~45%) levels of all six aggressiveness factors. Looking at the profile-specific factor solutions, five of the six original factors re-emerged with considerable similarity across profiles. These factors exhibited profile-specific configurations and correlations that support a reactive-to-proactive shift, in which more aggressive profiles were characterized less by angry responses to provocation and more by antagonistic tendencies that were less contingent on environmental inputs.