BACKGROUND The melancholic type of personality (TM) has long been considered in continental and Japanese psychopathology as a relevant vulnerability trait constellation for the development of depression. METHODS The symptom presentation in an outpatient population of 116 subjects suffering from a DSM-IV major depressive episode was rated according to the standardized documentation system of the Association for Methodology and Documentation in Psychiatry (AMDP). Personality features were explored by means of the Criteria for Typus Melancholicus (CTM). RESULTS Statistically significant differences in depression-related psychopathological scores (i.e. higher level of guilt feelings, feeling of the loss of feelings, loss of vital drive and lower degrees of irritability and dysphoria) were found between TM and non-TM subjects, supporting the phenomenic specificity of TM depression at both symptom and subsyndromal level. LIMITATION AND CONCLUSIONS: Although our results were obtained in a selected sample of outpatients at an University Mental Health Center, they are indicative of psychopathological differences between TM and NTM in the core symptoms of depression. These differences highlight the importance of including TM criteria for phenotypic characterization of depressive disorder, suggesting that it may improve diagnostic and therapeutic practice and might be a reasonable psychopathologic endophenotype in investigating affective-spectrum vulnerability in at-risk populations.