Heterogeneity in the structure of aggressive personality

Aggressiveness is a core feature of many personality disorders. Dozens of dispositional aggressiveness scales exist with their own idiosyncratic factor structures, but they can be distilled down into six factors: relational, angry, violent, retaliatory, intimate, and alcohol. Yet it remains unknown how this comprehensive factor structure might change or remain stable at relatively high levels of aggressiveness-knowledge with considerable relevance to the study of personality pathology. To examine this, I used factor mixture modeling on self-report data from 1,447 diverse undergraduates from a Minority Serving Institution, which combined the person-centered and variable-centered approaches of profile and factor analyses. Analyses revealed three latent profiles that were initially characterized by high (∼14% of sample), medium (∼41%), or low (∼45%) levels of all six aggressiveness factors. Looking at the profile-specific factor solutions, five of the six original factors reemerged with considerable similarity across profiles. These factors' profile-specific configurations and correlations portrayed a shift, in which more aggressive profiles were characterized less by angry tendencies toward retaliation and more by their antagonistic traits. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).