Development of a brief screening questionnaire for histrionic personality symptoms

•Histrionic personality disorder remains an understudied clinical syndrome.•We developed a brief, free screening measure for histrionic symptoms.•The screening measure demonstrate good reliability and validity.•Further testing will help demonstrate the measure’s clinical validity.

Compared to other personality disorders such as borderline or antisocial, histrionic personality disorder has received comparably little attention in the research and clinical literature. Currently, there is no freely accessible, stand-alone clinical measure for histrionic symptoms. In this article, we report two studies that examined the reliability, convergent validity and factor structure of a new measure of histrionic personality disorder symptoms, the Brief Histrionic Personality Scale (BHPS). Study 1 describes the initial development of the measure with 661 young adults. An initial pool of 36 items was narrowed down to a 11-item, reliable scale that converged highly with the Colligan/Morey/Offord MMPI scale for histrionic symptoms, as well as with a measure of extraversion. Exploratory factor analysis revealed a two-factor structure to the measure. In study 2, confirmatory factor analysis found that the two-factor model was a good fit to the data on a sample of 340 young adults. Taken together, these results suggest that the BHPS is a promising research and clinical tool for histrionic personality disorder.