Coherence in the science and practice of mental health assessment depends upon a tight connection between psychopathology concepts that are used and the way those concepts are operationalized and defined. In contrast, the use of the same word to mean more than one thing contributes to incoherence, inefficiency, and confusion. In this paper, we review three possible meanings of the word “dimension” as it relates to the assessment of psychopathology and describe how the indiscriminate use of this word has caused confusion in the general context of the transition to a more evidence-based approach to mental health diagnosis. We attempt to disambiguate the term “dimension” by demarcating three concepts that can be distinguished based on different empirical standards: continuous variables, unidimensional dimensions, and distinct dimensions.

心理健康评估的科学和实践的一致性取决于所使用的精神病理学概念与这些概念的操作和定义方式之间的紧密联系。相反，使用同一个词来表示多个事物会导致不连贯、低效和混乱。在本文中，我们回顾了“维度”一词与精神病理学评估相关的三种可能含义，并描述了在向更加基于证据的方法过渡的一般背景下，不加区别地使用该词如何造成混乱。心理健康诊断。我们试图通过划分三个可以根据不同经验标准区分的概念来消除“维度”一词的歧义：连续变量、一维维度和不同维度。