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The purpose of the current study was to identify enduring dispositions as potential points of contact between social and clinical psychology, investigate trends in their use in clinical research over time, and evaluate their applicability to the social-clinical interface. In light of the "emerging symbiosis" between social and personality psychology (Snyder, 2006; Swann & Seyle, 2005) and the historically strong association between personality and clinical psychology, we hypothesized that individual differences in enduring dispositions could serve as points of contact that would help inform the evolving social-clinical interface and provide a focus for future interface research. The results of our study suggest that despite some lulls, enduring dispositions are consistent aspects of clinical research over the last 40 years and thus serve as an area of overlap and intersection between social and clinical psychology. Our results also suggest that while personality traits are the most widely studied enduring dispositions in clinical psychology, individual differences in cognitive and affective traits, and to a lesser extent, motivation traits, are also broadly applicable to all three interface sub-areas identified by Leary (1987). Results are discussed with reference to historical milestones in clinical psychology that have helped procure the relevance of enduring dispositions to the social-clinical interface.
The overarching goal of a scientific interface is to identify a common boundary between independent disciplines in order to enhance communication and promote progress in each. With the growing specialization of contemporary psychologists, interdisciplinary interfaces have become a crucial part of staying connected with immense bodies of literature and their explicit or implicit links. An important but often neglected criterion for establishing an interface is the identification of overlapping areas of interest between two disciplines. Indeed advocates of the social-clinical interface have called upon interface researchers to "take on a more interactive model of intersection than has previously been the case . . . the two subareas need to establish an interface in an overlapping sense" (Snyder & Forsyth, 1991c, p. 801). Numerous theoretical (e.g., Kowalski & Leary, 1999; Leary, 1987; Leary & Maddux, 1987; Snyder & Forsyth, 1991b; Weary, 1987) and empirical (Snyder, Tennen, Affleck, & Cheavens, 2000) efforts to identify areas of convergence between social and clinical psychology have been proposed, as have numerous topics appropriate for interface research...