Psychometric properties of hierarchical psychiatric symptoms on the general population

Although psychiatric disorders have conventionally been treated categorically, recent research indicates a continuous and hierarchical structure among psychiatric symptoms, with a general psychopathology factor (p-factor) at the top and several specific factors at lower levels. However, the understanding of the psychometric properties of these factors in the general population remains limited. In this study, by analyzing responses from approximately 1000 non-Western individuals across three datasets to various diagnostic questionnaires, we extracted general and specific factors using diverse hierarchical structures and factor numbers. Comparative analysis revealed distinct properties of the general and specific factors, regardless of model assumptions. Specifically, the general factor explained a greater proportion of shared variance in the data and exhibited higher internal consistency than the specific factors. Consistent with the concept of the p-factor, the general factor was associated with a history of diagnoses across various diagnostic categories. Conversely, the content of the specific factors varied depending on the factor numbers, and some corresponded to traditional diagnostic categories, indicating that specific factors may be advantageous for describing individual differences. Our findings, we believe, provide a scaffold for disentangling the complex structure among psychiatric symptoms.