The VIA Classification of Character Strengths and Virtues (Peterson & Seligman, 2004) is a comprehensive model of positive personality consisting of 24 dimensions called the character strengths. Research has suggested that higher levels of character strength use is associated with greater well-being and lower levels of self-reported psychological symptomatology. It has been suggested that measuring character strength overuse and underuse can provide an alternate strategy for detecting problems with character strengths use. The Golden Mean Inventory (GMI; McGrath et al., Personality and Individual Differences, 234, 112951, 2025) was developed as a direct measure of overuse/optimal use/underuse (OU) of character strengths, or of balanced/imbalanced (BI) use. The present study assessed the convergent validity between character strengths and measures of common psychological disorders. Participants (N = 307) completed a series of questionnaires to measure character strengths, overuse/underuse of character strengths, depression, anxiety, psychotic symptoms, alcohol use, and suicidal behaviors. Results indicated a general pattern of negative associations between character strengths and common psychological disorder symptoms. Correlations between VIA-IS-P and GMI OU scales were the highest, indicative of their both associating more strengths use with higher scores. Results also indicated that relatively few people saw themselves as overusers, whereas underuse was consistently an indicator of symptoms. BI coding of the GMI generated effective predictors of common psychological symptoms, and a series of hypotheses about anticipated patterns of relationship between overuse/underuse and symptoms was generally supported.
