Other additions include "snowflake", a now-derogatory term that was defined in 1983 as a person "having a unique personality and potential", but has now come to be "used as an insulting term for a person characterised as overly sensitive or as feeling entitled to special treatment or consideration".
The Type D personality, or the "distressed personality", is characterised by two global personality traits: negative affectivity (NA) and social inhibition (SI).
The most severe cases are linked with another personality disorder: sociopathy (formally known as anti-social personality disorder) characterised by a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others.
Dr Adrian Grounds, a forensic psychiatrist appointed as an independent witness to the tribunal, said Brady was not schizophrenic or depressed but instead suffered from a "severe personality disorder characterised by superiority, self-centredness, contempt, hostility".
Bin Laden has consciously de-emphasised his own fate and spoken openly of a succession plan – al-Qaida is not the cult of personality that characterised Sendero Luminoso or Aum Shinrikyo, for example.
Recent clinical and empirical works are based on Cleckley's clinical observations in which psychopathy is viewed as a personality disorder, characterised by a lack of emotions, callousness, unreliability and superficiality.
Within the ERI model, overcommitment is a personality trait characterised as a pattern of coping with demand in combination with a strong desire for approval and esteem.
This has been further corroborated by recent evidence suggesting that cerebellar patients can show cognitive and affective deficits, in particular executive dysfunction, impaired spatial memory, and personality changes characterised by disinhibited or in appropriate behaviour, with some cases having clear psychotic features [ 6].
These households, in turn, breed what he describes as an "employment-resistant personality" that is characterised by low conscientiousness and agreeableness.
Such tenacity underlined his commitment to hard work, and it was that dour, earnest attribute of his personality that also characterised many of the buildings he brought into being.
