Depressive personality and its relationship to depressed mood, interpersonal loss, negative parental perceptions, and perfectionism.

Eighty veteran psychiatric outpatients were evaluated for depressive personality disorder on the Depressive Personality Disorder Inventory (DPDI). It was predicted that those classified with depressive personality would report higher levels of interpersonal loss, negative perceptions of their parents, and higher levels of perfectionism than psychiatric control subjects. Nine of the 12 measures of these variables were significantly greater in those with depressive personality compared with psychiatric control subjects. When statelike depression was controlled for, seven of the nine variables still significantly differed between the two groups. Hierarchical regression analysis and discriminant function analysis found that these variables predicted 9% of the variance in the DPDI above and beyond statelike depression, and that a combination of these variables correctly classified 91% of the depressive personalities and 88% of the psychiatric control subjects. It is concluded that, as hypothesized, depressive personality disorder is associated with loss, negative parental perceptions, and perfectionism, and that these relationships are not accounted for exclusively by a depressed mood.