Personality Correlates of Dissociation: Benign Characteristics or Predilections to Mental Illness?

Dissociation is typically defined as the lack of normal integration of thoughts, feelings, and experiences into the stream of consciousness and memory. It has been related to poor mental health in both normal and psychiatric populations. Most research has focussed on its association with childhood trauma and abuse. However, given the unreliability of childhood memories, heightened dissociative experiences may not be indicative of a history of childhood trauma and subsequent dissociative pathology. Personality characteristics such as fantasy proneness and absentmindedness may better explain dissociative experiences and its relationship to psychological distress. In this book we provide evidence that these two characteristics are related to both dissociation and general mental health, with absentmindedness the strongest unique predictor of psychological distress. This book is likely to be of interest to personality researchers in clinical psychology and mental health practitioners who are looking for characteristics beyond self-reports of childhood trauma in understanding the nature of dissociation in their clients.