Before and after: Personality pathology, childhood conditions, and life history outcomes

•Personality pathologies were associated with unpredictable childhoods.•Men were reported higher rates of personality pathologies than women did.•Psychoticism and detachment were associated with interpersonal dysfunction.•Links between childhood conditions and outcomes was mediated by personality.•The mediated links were moderated by participant's sex.

In this study (N = 253), we examined how pathological personality traits are related to (self-reported) childhood conditions and the adult life outcomes of rates of education, socioeconomic status, income, and number of offspring for men and women. We found (1) childhood unpredictability was more strongly associated with pathological personality traits than was harshness; (2) higher levels of psychoticism were associated with a broad-spectrum of adverse life history outcomes; (3) men reported higher levels of detachment, antagonism, disinhibition, and psychoticism than women reported; and (4) moderated-mediational analyses suggested detachment and antagonism differentially mediated the associations between childhood socioecological conditions and adult life outcomes for men and women.