Treating personality-relationship transactions with respect: Narrow facets, advanced models, and extended time frames.

Abstract

Contrary to premises of dynamic transactionism, most studies investigating personality-relationship transaction only found personality effects on relationships but failed to find effects of relationship experiences on personality development. The current study reconsiders this issue in 3 ways. First, alongside the broad Big Five characteristics (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness), specific personality facets were considered to make comparisons with relationships more symmetric. Second, a recent extension of latent change modeling was applied allowing for a theoretically more appropriate model that compensates for the shortcomings of traditionally used cross-lagged panel or growth curve models. Third, personality-relationship transaction was studied from young adulthood to midlife using a 15-year longitudinal study with 654 German adults. Results showed patterns of personality-relationship transaction with the romantic partner, friends, kin, and other interaction partners. Specifically, the development of Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness and their facets was closely interacting with partner and friend relationships, underlining the importance of these relationships for personality maturation during the adult years. We conclude that relationship effects have often been underestimated in previous studies. They are not bound to specific developmental periods, such as emerging adulthood, but their detection depends on the modeling approach and the analysis level (broad dimensions vs. facets). Relationship effects are most likely to occur in relationships that reflect self-selected life styles and circumstances.

Concurrent and longitudinal dyadic polynomial regression analyses of Big Five traits and relationship satisfaction: Does similarity matter?

“…Five personality traits on relationship satisfaction, in contrast to previous studies on romantic couples (Karney & Bradbury, 1995;Mund & Neyer, 2014;Solomon & Jackson, 2014).…”

“…These results suggest that being low in neuroticism and high in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion is beneficial for one's own relationship satisfaction as well as the relationship satisfaction of the partner over time. However, results are contradictory for openness to experience (Karney & Bradbury, 1995;Mund & Neyer, 2014;Solomon & Jackson, 2014).…”

“…In addition, due to the large number of models tested and to avoid Type 1 error rates, we follow the procedure of past research on personality and relationships and only interpret standardized regression coefficients larger than .10 that are significant on a p < .01 level (Mund & Neyer, 2014;Parker, Lüdtke, Trautwein, & Roberts, 2012). For the longitudinal analyses, we additionally controlled for the stability (autoregressive effect) in relationship satisfaction.…”

An Exploratory Investigation of the Role of Openness in Relationship Quality among Emerging Adult Chinese Couples

“…First, we focus on Chinese emerging adults since emerging adulthood varies by culture and in developing countries; for example, in China, emerging adulthood may be experienced more often in urban areas than in rural areas (Arnett, 2014). Meanwhile, although previous studies on the relationship between personality and relationship quality have used both individual samples and dyadic samples among marriage cohorts (Holland and Roisman, 2008; Dyrenforth et al, 2010; Mund and Neyer, 2014), the changing life stages, demands, and expectations outside the intimate relationship may lead to different effects on personality (Shiota and Levenson, 2007), so it is necessary to dedicate the research on the effect of personality on emerging adults’ romantic relationships. Thus, this study provided new knowledge on the emerging adults of an emerging country.…”

Loneliness Effects on Personality: Preprint

“…It can be speculated that a reason for this result might lie in the assessment of the Big Five traits in the pairfam sample: The BFI-K is a short scale to assess broad personality traits, thereby inevitably favoring bandwidth over fidelity (e.g., Hogan & Roberts, 1996). Although reliably capturing individual levels of the Big Five, the BFI-K might not have assessed the facets of the traits that drive personality development in the first place or sampled items from facets that change in different directions (Mund & Neyer, 2014;Soto & John, 2012), leading to the observation of no mean-level change. In line with this reasoning, other studies that have employed similarly bandwidth-focused measures (e.g., Lucas & Donnellan, 2011;Milojev & Sibley, 2017;Specht, Egloff, & Schmukle, 2011;Wortman, Lucas, & Donnellan, 2012) also reported patterns of personality development that diverge from the meta-analytic findings by Roberts et al (2006).…”