Beyond the Big Five: Disintegration as a Predictor of Daily Depression, Anxiety, and Rumination

The Big Five personality traits, particularly Negative Emotionality, are well-established correlates of internalizing symptoms. However, less is known about whether Disintegration, a proposed basic personality trait reflecting proneness to psychotic-like experiences and beliefs, accounts for additional individual differences in internalizing experiences in everyday life. The present study examined the incremental contribution of Disintegration beyond the Big Five to daily depression, anxiety, and rumination. A sample of 156 psychology students completed measures of Disintegration and the Big Five, followed by seven days of daily diary assessments (916 observations). Multilevel models were used to examine associations between personality traits and daily internalizing experiences. When all six personality traits were considered simultaneously, Disintegration was uniquely associated with higher daily depression (β = .25), anxiety (β = .24), and rumination (β = .17), alongside Negative Emotionality. Adding Disintegration to the Big Five increased explained variance by 10.25% for depression, 7.79% for anxiety, and 2.69% for rumination. Sensitivity analyses excluding potentially overlapping symptom-related content supported the robustness of the associations with depression and anxiety. These findings suggest that Disintegration contributes to explaining between-person differences in everyday internalizing experiences beyond established personality dimensions, extending evidence for its incremental validity to repeated daily assessments.