Am J Psychiatry 1990; 147:586-590
Copyright © 1990 by American Psychiatric Association
Gender weighting of DSM-III-R personality disorder criteria
J Sprock, RK Blashfield and B Smith
Psychology Department, Indiana State University, Terre Haute.
This study explored the gender weighting of the diagnostic criteria for
personality disorders. Gender weighting was defined in terms of how 33
female and 17 male nonclinicians ranked the diagnostic criteria along a
male-female dimension. Although the a priori expectation was that
antisocial would be the prototypically masculine personality disorder and
histrionic the feminine, the subjects ranked criteria from the sadistic
category as the most masculine and those from the dependent category as the
most feminine. These results and the subjects' gender weighting of criteria
for borderline, obsessive-compulsive, and self- defeating personality
disorders are analyzed in detail.
