Positive Psychopathology: Manic Behavior and Depression Through Character Strengths Under and Overuse Communities

Recent research has utilized network analysis to identify communities of character strengths, resulting in the discovery of four communities: Discernment, Interpersonal, Responsibility, and Energy. In this study, we aimed to replicate these communities and explore their relevance to psychopathology. Prior research indicates the strengths under-overuse is superior to a positive conceptualization of strengths in explaining psychopathology. We hypothesized that under-overuse communities would provide a better understanding of depression and manic behavior than the strengths communities. In analyzing an existing international sample of 970 participants, we replicated all four strengths communities. Our findings indicate that all communities of strengths significantly explained depression, with the Energy community explaining the most variance. Additionally, all four strengths underuse communities significantly explained depression, with the Lethargic community explaining the most variance. In contrast, only the Responsibility community of strengths explained manic behavior, while all four communities of strengths overuse significantly explained manic behavior, with the Turgid community explaining the most variance. Overall, the under-overuse communities were more effective in explaining these disorders than the strengths communities, expanding and providing further support to this novel outlook on psychopathology. Future research should replicate and validate these findings and extend them to other disorders.