Personality Profiles Among People With Functional Motor Disorders

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.

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.

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).

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.