Effortful control, executive inhibition, and personality dysfunction: Bridging temperament, neurocognition, and psychopathology

Personality dysfunction results, in part, from maladaptive interactions among temperamental factors, neurocognitive deficits, and environmental influences (Linehan, 1993; Zelkowitz et al. 2001). Posner and Rothbart (2002; 2003) posited a developmental psychobiological model that emphasizes a particular temperament dimension, effortful control, in the development subsequent personality dysfunction. Behaviors associated with effortful control depend on executive inhibition, which refers to the neurocognitive ability to modulate a dominant response in order to achieve one's goals (Nigg, 2000). Poor effortful control among adult borderline personality disorder patients is associated with inefficiency in the executive attention network, a coordinated neural circuit involved in resolving conflict among stimuli and correcting behavioral errors (Posner et al., 2002). Executive inhibition subsumes the notion of executive attention efficiency and consists of three facets that are putatively distinct: interference control, behavioral inhibition, and cognitive inhibition.;The present study sought to extend Posner and Rothbart's model by exploring the role of effortful control and executive inhibition in an array of dysfunctional personality traits measured by a major inventory of personality dysfunction, the SNAP-2 (Clark, Wu, Simms, and Casilla, in press). Following the taxonomy outlined by Nigg (2000), 112 nonclinical adult participants completed six experimental measures of executive inhibition, as well as the SNAP-2 and the Adult Temperament Questionnaire (Evans & Rothbart, 2007). Our results were inconsistent with the hypothesized inhibition facet structure and suggested that executive inhibition is a unidimensional construct, which is consonant with the existence of a nonaffective constraint neurobehavioral system underpinned by serotonin function (Depue & Collins, 1999).;We found modest support for the link between effortful control and personality dysfunction. Effortful control was not closely associated with executive inhibition, and relationships between personality dysfunction and effortful control were not mediated by executive inhibition, suggesting that self-reported effortful control does not adequately capture inhibitory capacity. Executive inhibitory deficits were linked with many personality dysfunction traits, including aggression, manipulativeness, mistrust, and entitlement. Performance on inhibition measures suggested particular involvement of anterior cingulate cortex in personality dysfunction. This study provides preliminary support for the role of executive inhibition deficits in a diversity of dysfunctional personality traits.