ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTION The child behavior checklist dysregulation profile predicts adolescent DSM-5 pathological personality traits 4 years later Elien De Caluwe ´ • Mieke Decuyper • Barbara De Clercq Received: 9 September 2012 / Accepted: 16 January 2013 / Published online: 5 February 2013 Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 Abstract Emotional dysregulation in childhood has been associated with various forms of later psychopathology, although no studies have investigated the personality related adolescent outcomes associated with early emotional dys- regulation. The present study uses a typological approach to examine how the child behavior checklist-dysregulation profile (CBCL-DP) predicts DSM-5 pathological personality traits (as measured with the personality inventory for the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders 5 or PID-5 by Krueger et al. (Psychol Med 2012)) across a time span of 4 years in a sample of 243 children aged 8–14 years (57.2 % girls). The results showed that children assigned to the CBCL-DP class are at risk for elevated scores on a wide range of DSM-5 personality pathology features, includ- ing higher scores on hostility, risk taking, deceitfulness, callousness, grandiosity, irresponsibility, impulsivity and manipulativeness. These results are discussed in the context of identifying early manifestations of persistent regulation problems, because of their enduring impact on a child’s personality development. Keywords Childhood Á Adolescence Á Child behavior checklist dysregulation profile Á Personality pathology Á Latent class analysis Introduction Although the fourth edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-IV-TR [2]) provides explicit criteria for bipolar disorder in adults, there is no consensus on the applicability of these criteria in younger age groups [3–5]. From an alternative and age-specific per- spective, Biederman et al. [6] were the first to demonstrate that children suffering from juvenile bipolar disorder (JBD) can be characterized along their elevated scores on three scales of the well-established child behavior checklist (CBCL [7, 8]), including the anxious/depressed (AD), attention problems (AP), and aggressive behavior (AGG) scales. This initial finding was subsequently replicated by independent research groups [9–13], and stimulated the use of a specific label for this CBCL profile, such as the CBCL- juvenile bipolar disorder profile (CBCL-JBD [14]), the CBCL-pediatric bipolar disorder profile [15] or the CBCL mania proxy [16]. These different labels all refer to children with co-occurring clinical symptoms of anxiety or depres- sion, attention problems and aggressive behavior, and hence only differ in their naming of this behavioral profile. The validity of the CBCL-JBD profile has been well documented, with empirical evidence supporting its heri- tability [14], stability across age [17], and consistency across countries, samples and methodologies [14, 18]. Specific predictive validity of the CBCL-JBD profile for juvenile bipolarity was initially demonstrated by Bieder- man et al. [6] and was further replicated in a range of studies [10, 11, 14, 19, 20], that all underscored the value of the CBCL-JBD profile as a screening tool for bipolarity at a young age. More recent evidence has, however, shown that the profile is less predictive of future bipolar disorder in children, and more predictive of outcomes that are characterized by a broader dysregulation component [21– 25], resulting in a proposal of Ayer et al. [23] to consider this profile as a proxy for the assessment of early self- regulation disorders, including affective, cognitive and behavioral dysregulation. Corroborating this suggestion, E. De Caluwe ´(&) Á M. Decuyper Á B. De Clercq Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium e-mail: elien.decaluwe@ugent.be 123 Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry (2013) 22:401–411 DOI 10.1007/s00787-013-0379-9