Editor Spotlight

Miller is a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia.

Background

Tell us a bit about your background: What is your area of research? What is your most recent journal-editing experience?

My research focuses on the close connections between personality and psychopathology, with a specific focus on how studying basic personality traits can help in understanding more pathological personality disorder configurations. I am particularly interested in personality disorders related to externalizing difficulties like narcissism and psychopathy, as well as the basic traits that underlie them (e.g., antagonism).

In terms of previous editorial experiences, I was fortunate to serve as an associate editor at the Journal of Abnormal Psychology and the Journal of Personality; I also gained expertise while serving on the editorial boards of several journals. Prior to taking on my current role at Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment (PD:TRT), I was the editor-in-chief at the Journal of Research in Personality for three years.

Priorities

Briefly, what are your main priorities? For example, how will you grow readership, what type of scholarship would you like to see in the journal, and what kind of content are you hoping to attract?

One of my primary priorities is bringing to PD:TRT open science practices such as encouraging preregistration; offering Registered Report submissions; encouraging the inclusion of open data, materials, code; and adopting open science badges and the contributor roles taxonomy (better known as CRediT). I am particularly concerned by the lower than ideal statistical power found in much of psychology, so I am asking authors to include a priori power analyses, submit work with larger sample sizes, and restrict themselves to analyses for which they have sufficient power. As for preregistration, I now require that all submissions include a statement regarding whether the work was preregistered, and I hope that during my tenure a high percentage of submissions will be preregistered. I am deeply concerned by the consequences that stem from the interplay between analytic flexibility (e.g., p hacking, garden of forking paths, researcher degrees of freedom) and the lack of transparency in much of the work in the behavioral sciences, and I hope to help move this section of the field toward adopting practices that may reduce the frequency of these problems.

I am also hoping to bring greater diversity, broadly speaking, to PD:TRT in terms of content, authorship, and reviewers. For instance, I have worked to increase the percentage of international scholars on the editorial board and to bring more early career researchers into the fold, both in terms of who is serving on the editorial board and who is invited to submit manuscripts for special issues, target conceptual articles, and related commentaries. Like much of psychology, the field of personality disorders is remarkably U.S.- and Eurocentric; not only do we need greater diversity in our samples, but we need greater diversity in our researchers, clinicians, and reviewers. As the journal grows—and it is still quite new, relatively speaking—this is an area in clear need of improvement.

Journal importance

Why is this journal important for the field? What is its relevance to society/public health? What are the hot issues in your area right now?

Personality and personality disorders are underappreciated by many in clinical psychology, psychiatry, and allied fields. For instance, national funding agencies appear to be less interested in personality disorders, at least as compared with other mental health conditions, despite the fact that personality disorders are present early in the life course; chronic; moderately difficult to treat; and associated with distress, impairment, and harm to others.

In terms of hot issues in our field, we are, of course, still in the midst of major changes to our diagnostic nosologies. For instance, in 2013, the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (5th ed.; DSM-5) introduced a new diagnostic model—the alternative model of personality disorders (AMPD)—that has generated a great deal of empirical attention, although much is yet to be learned about its use in applied settings. The eleventh revision of the “International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems” will provide another radically transformed diagnostic model of personality disorders that aligns in some fundamental ways with the DSM-5’s AMPD but is far from synonymous. After decades of empirical work demonstrating the dimensionality of personality disorders and the success of aligning pathological personality constructs with more general or basic models of personality, it is exciting to see these kinds of fundamental changes come to fruition. Of course, we would not be personality disorder researchers if we were not still going to argue vociferously about these changes, both large and small. Nonetheless, I see these as important steps in the right direction.

As for other pressing issues, I think it is hard for any single researcher—who is probably a bit overspecialized and a little myopic—to provide a complete list. I could easily name issues and concerns that I observe in my own corner of the personality disorder world, which is focused on narcissism and psychopathy, but I would miss those in other domains. One thing I am particularly excited about is an ongoing project led by PD:TRT’s (first ever) associate editor, Carla Sharp, and scholars at the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders, which will culminate in a paper that will document consensual facts about borderline personality disorder, areas of disagreement, and key questions ripe for further exploration. This paper is being modeled after an excellent article by Angus W. MacDonald and S. Charles Schulz (2009) who took this same approach in relation to schizophrenia. I think these kinds of collaborative projects that pull together multiple voices from different perspectives have the opportunity to describe quite clearly what is known and what needs to be studied with regard to personality disorders. My hope would be that this paper may serve as an example for similar papers on other personality disorders’ constructs and issues.

Challenges

What challenges, if any, lie ahead for the field?

Getting clinicians and personality disorder researchers to talk to each other is a critically important challenge. Much of researchers’ empirical work gains little traction among front-line mental health practitioners because we fail to make clear how or why it might be used. Academics and researchers need to do a better job of translating our work and explaining its relevance and utility.

Another major challenge is a replication crisis in psychology and science more generally. For a variety of reasons—prejudice against the null hypothesis; incentives favoring overstating one’s findings and creating cleaner, more exciting narratives; exploratory work being reframed as confirmatory; analytic flexibility; reliance on small samples (or smaller than the analyses require)—the robustness of the empirical literature is a concern. It is my hope that scholars in clinical psychology in general and personality disorder research more specifically will recognize these problems and take steps to improve. I believe that encouraging preregistration and registered reports, increasing the perceived value of direct replications and the esteem in which they are held, supporting more transparently exploratory work, and having a greater focus on statistical power are some steps that can help attenuate these issues, but both top-down and bottom-up changes are needed to see meaningful improvement.

Plans

Do you have plans for a special issue or changes to the editorial process? Have you introduced or are you planning to introduce any changes?

My greatest excitement related to helming the journal is being able to put together special issues. I am fortunate to have a great associate editor, Carla Sharp, with whom I am leading two special issues. The first will be a (roughly) 10-year retrospective on the AMPD. Although the DSM-5 was published in 2013, the proposals for the model came out in 2011, so around 10 years of data are available on how well it has fared. This special issue will feature four primary articles on key issues surrounding the AMPD (i.e., Criterion A, Criterion B, overall model performance, clinical utility); each of these will have three associated commentaries. In addition, six short articles will explore the success of the AMPD in relation to the six personality disorders the model describes (e.g., borderline, schizotypal). Depending on how quickly things proceed, this will be either the first or the second issue published in 2022.

The second special issue we are working on is focused on methodological and statistical issues in personality disorder work. Articles will explore a variety of topics relevant to the study of personality disorders, such as statistical power, analytic approaches, sampling, data validity, open science, use of laboratory tasks, collection of longitudinal data, and ecological momentary assessments. Our goal is to have leading experts articulate advantages and disadvantages, decision points, and other considerations for these topics and for their articles to be written so as to be helpful for scholars with varied levels of experience.

Citation

MacDonald, A. W., & Schulz, S. C. (2009). What we know: Findings that every theory of schizophrenia should explain. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 35(3), 493–508. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbp017opens in new window

• Read more about Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment
• Return to Editor Spotlight homepage