On the Relation Between Maladaptive Personality Traits and Emotional Crying

Abstract

We take advantage of recent advances in the assessment of maladaptive personality traits to better understand how a broad range of aspects of psychopathology are associated with emotional crying. In two cross-sectional studies, we assessed the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5) traits, various aspects of emotional crying (e.g., crying frequency, crying latency, crying proneness, affect improvement after crying, and strategic use of crying), emotion regulation strategies/problems, and measures of perceived social support in individuals with a mental health diagnosis (total N = 1105 from the U.S.; Study 2 was preregistered). Our findings revealed replicable and plausible associations between PID-5 traits and emotional crying: Negative affectivity and disinhibition were positively related to crying frequency; antagonism and psychoticism were positively related to the use of strategic crying; and detachment was negatively linked to affect improvement after crying. Additional analyses showed that perceived social support and emotion regulation strategies mediated the negative relation between detachment and affect improvement after crying, suggesting that beneficial emotion regulation is embedded within a social context. By systematically examining the relation between emotional crying and maladaptive personality traits, our findings offer new insights into emotion expression in psychopathology. They help clarify who cries frequently or rarely, who experiences relief after crying and why, and who strategically uses crying to achieve personal goals.