Review Article Psychopathology 2020;53:149–156 The Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD) from the Perspective of the Five-Factor Model Thomas A. Widiger Gillian A. McCabe Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA Received: December 2, 2019 Accepted: March 19, 2020 Published online: June 11, 2020 Thomas A. Widiger, PhD Department of Psychology University of Kentucky, 115 Kastle Hall Lexington, KY 40506-0044 (USA) widiger @uky.edu © 2020 S. Karger AG, Basel karger@karger.com www.karger.com/psp DOI: 10.1159/000507378 Keywords DSM-5 · Alternative Model of Personality Disorders · AMPD · Five-Factor Model · Personality disorders · Personality traits Abstract The fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 5th ed. Washington: American Psychiatric Association; 2013) includes an Alterna- tive Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD). The AMPD in- cludes two components: the Criterion A level of personality functioning (i.e., impairments or deficits in the sense of self and interpersonal relatedness) and the Criterion B five-do- main maladaptive trait model. The purpose of the current paper is to discuss the AMPD from the perspective of the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of general personality structure. The conclusion of this review is that both the Criterion A self- other deficits and the Criterion B traits can be understood as maladaptive variants of the FFM. © 2020 S. Karger AG, Basel The Alternative Model of Personality Disorders from the Perspective of the Five-Factor Model The fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Associa- tion’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5; [1]) includes an Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD). The AMPD includes two components: (1) the Criterion A level of personality func- tioning (LPF; i.e., impairments or deficits in the sense of self and interpersonal relatedness) and (2) the Criterion B five-domain maladaptive trait model. The AMPD is a significant step toward the development of a dimensional trait model conceptualization of personality disorders (PDs) that will provide a more accurate, complete, and clinically useful description of a patient’s personality, fa- cilitating thereby patient-therapist communication and treatment planning [2–4]. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the AMPD from the perspective of the Five-Fac- tor Model (FFM) of general personality structure. Both the Criterion A LPF and the Criterion B maladaptive trait model will be considered. We begin with a discussion of the relationship of the Criterion B traits with the FFM, as this relationship is relatively more straightforward.