Personality Profiles Among People With Functional Motor Disorders 2025 Cucco et al

[Andy]

Abstract​

Objective:​

Although psychological issues are not diagnostic criteria for functional neurological disorder (FND), they often occur among individuals with FND, especially among those with functional seizures. However, corresponding findings for individuals with functional motor disorder (FMD) are inconclusive.

Methods:​

Thirty individuals with FMD and 30 age-, education-, and sex-matched healthy control (HC) individuals completed the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory–2. The authors used the test’s 10 basic clinical scales and its 15 content scales along with their subscales to explore the participants’ personality profiles. After logarithmic data transformation, parametric tests were performed to compare the two groups.

Results:​

Individuals with FMD had significantly higher scores than those in the HC group on the following basic clinical scales: hypochondriasis, depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviance, paranoia, psychasthenia, and schizophrenia (p<0.005). Compared with participants in the HC group, a higher proportion of those with FMD surpassed the cutoff score for the hypochondriasis, depression, hysteria, paranoia, and schizophrenia scales. Individuals with FMD showed a specific personality pattern, the “passive-aggressive valley,” characterized by high scores on the psychopathic deviance and paranoia scales and low scores on the masculinity-femininity scale. Individuals with FMD had higher scores than those in the HC group on anxiety, obsessiveness, depression, health concerns, low self-esteem, and work interference scales (p<0.003).

Conclusions:​

Individuals with FMD had significantly higher impairments in emotional-cognitive functioning compared with HC individuals, characterized by excessive attention to somatic sensations, poor emotional insight, and cognitive inflexibility, associated with personality features of susceptibility, misperception of threats, unexpressed anger, and behaviors indicating unmet emotional needs.

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[Trish]

This seems extremely judgemental. Have these questionnaires been properly validated on people with disabling chronic diseases? I'm guessing not.

 

[Utsikt]

This seems extremely judgemental. Have these questionnaires been properly validated on people with disabling chronic diseases? I'm guessing not.

It’s a test with 567 true/false questions that was originally developed in 1943.

https://psychtest.net/wp-content/uploads/MMPI-2-Test-Questions.pdf

It appears to be a favourite in the field of personality research, so I don’t think we have to take it very seriously..

 

[rvallee]

Although psychological issues are not diagnostic criteria for functional neurological disorder

What an odd thing to say. I guess pretending about bullshit like this makes it feel real, but I don't buy that they are that gullible, they're just parroting what gets easy funding and attention. It's literally constructed out of it, but pretending is part of the bullshit. Still, what an extremely odd thing to put down into writing.

hypochondriasis, depression, hysteria, psychopathic deviance, paranoia, psychasthenia, and schizophrenia

None of those things are personality profiles, or anything like it.

anxiety, obsessiveness, depression, health concerns, low self-esteem, and work interference scales

Neither are those. Button soup is soup made of a single button, and nothing else.

excessive attention to somatic sensations, poor emotional insight, and cognitive inflexibility, associated with personality features of susceptibility, misperception of threats, unexpressed anger, and behaviors indicating unmet emotional needs

Every single one of those is a normal consequence of illness, and plain factual, in the case of unmet emotional needs. They're basically pretending to "find" things we literally tell them about, but they don't care about any of it, just what's in it for them. Or it's wrong, in the case of misperception of threats. They don't even realize they are predatory to us, so they can't view the threat they represent for what it is. Incredible.

They really don't have a clue about illness, so much that they literally invent fake mental illnesses to account for it. They only ever know disease, illness is as total a mystery to them as to the very first physician. We are oddly in the best and the worst period in the history of medicine, at the same time, and for mutually exclusive reasons: the best comes out of science, the worst is this junk. But they're obsessed with the worst, and have mostly given up on the best.

 

[Utsikt]

They really don't have a clue about illness, so much that they literally invent fake mental illnesses to account for it. They only ever know disease, illness is as total a mystery to them as to the very first physician. We are oddly in the best and the worst period in the history of medicine, at the same time, and for mutually exclusive reasons: the best comes out of science, the worst is this junk. But they're obsessed with the worst, and have mostly given up on the best.

It feels like some kind of twisted version of the Stanford prison experiment.

«I wonder what happens if we gaslight and abuse patients for decades, and then try to blame it on what we tell them are their own character flaws.»