Full Length Article
Spousal Agreement on Partner Personality Ratings is Moderated by Relationship Satisfaction

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2018.07.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Agreement on personality traits is moderated by relationship satisfaction.

  • Wives’ relationship satisfaction moderates agreement on husbands’ self-regulatory traits.

  • Husbands’ relationship satisfaction moderates agreement on wives’ emotionality traits.

  • Greater relationship satisfaction is related to greater agreement on personality traits.

Abstract

Although adult personality is usually assessed via self-report, knowledgeable informants provide useful information on others’ traits. While self-informant agreement on personality is highest among spouses, agreement varies across couples, potentially moderated by relationship satisfaction. It remains unclear whether relationship satisfaction impacts trait agreement generally or for specific traits. Further, moderation of agreement by satisfaction may differ depending on the informant’s role (i.e., husband/wife). We examined whether informant relationship satisfaction moderated informant-self agreement on normative and non-adaptive personality traits in 376 heterosexual couples. Spouses showed low actual personality similarity but higher assumed similarity. Self-informant agreement was significant, albeit modest, for many traits. Agreement for specific traits was moderated by relationship satisfaction, varying by informant’s role. Implications for personality assessment are discussed.

Introduction

Adult personality is usually measured by self-report. Indeed, approximately 70% of studies published in the Journal of Research in Personality in 2003 used self-report as the sole method of assessing personality (Vazire, 2006). Given its predictive validity for important life outcomes and clinical variables (Kotov et al., 2010, Roberts et al., 2007), there is clear support for the use of self-report methodologies. Nevertheless, basic measurement theory (Campbell & Fiske, 1959) calls for the use of multiple approaches to assessing psychological constructs such as personality. Informant reports of personality, which also have a rich history in personality research (Vazire & Carlson, 2010), may provide a valuable additional source of information on individual differences in both normative and dysfunctional personality traits (e.g., Klonsky et al., 2002, Vazire, 2006).

Aside from the psychometric advantages inherent to multimethod approaches, informant-reports offer other benefits. Vazire (2006) argued that informant-reported personality allows for a secondary perspective on an individual’s personality, one that can be conceptualized as their “reputation” rather than their “identity” (Hogan, 1998). From this perspective, informant- and self-reported personality are measuring somewhat separable phenomena, with both vantage points yielding useful information. Meta-analyses (Connelly and Ones, 2010, Connolly et al., 2007) show that informant-reports of personality provide unique information relative to self-reports; specifically, these studies found self-informant agreement on the Big 5 (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness) ranged from r = .46–.62 (Connolly et al., 2007) and r = .29–.41 (Connelly & Ones, 2010), establishing that self- and informant perspectives are not redundant with one another. More importantly, however, informant-rated personality contributes useful information beyond that of self-report in terms of predicting outcomes of interest (e.g., Miller et al., 2005, Ready et al., 2002).

Rater agreement on a given target’s personality may be affected by a number of factors, including the observability and evaluativeness of the trait being measured (Funder, 1995). Observability refers to the degree to which a trait is manifested in behaviors that are salient and observable to others, whereas evaluativeness speaks to the social desirability of a trait (Vazire, 2010). These issues may be particularly relevant in the context of self-informant agreement when assessing non-adaptive/pathological aspects of personality (Klonsky et al., 2002). Specifically, the extreme ends of personality traits are presumably often more observable and potentially less socially desirable (Mottus et al., 2014, Vazire, 2010). Furthermore, personality pathology is often characterized by poor self-insight (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) and may lead to potentially biased or misleading responding in self-reports (Ganellen, 2007). Thus, the combination of poor insight and the tendency to exhibit extreme manifestations of personality traits in personality pathology (Saulsman & Page, 2004) may influence self-informant agreement. Overall, self-informant agreement on pathological personality traits (e.g., r = .11 (Cooper, Balsis, & Oltmanns, 2012); median r = .36 (Klonksy et al., 2002); r = .21–.30 (Oltmanns & Turkheimer, 2009)) may be lower than that for ratings of normative personality (e.g., r = .29–.62; Connolly et al., 2007, Connelly and Ones, 2010). However, other literature indicates ample self-informant agreement even on pathological traits (e.g., Kelley et al., 2017, Miller et al., 2011, Miller et al., 2014) suggesting that pathological personality does not invariably lead to low agreement. It seems likely that agreement varies as a function of complex interplay between familiarity of the dyad, trait salience, self-awareness of the target, and informant characteristics that influence their ability to provide accurate information (Funder, 2012, Watson et al., 2000).

Additionally, the informant’s familiarity with the individual on whom they are reporting impacts agreement on personality ratings. More specifically, as an informant’s relationship to the target (the person they are rating) becomes increasingly close (e.g., family members, friends, spouse), agreement tends to increase relative to dyads that are typically less close (e.g., work colleagues, strangers; Connolly et al., 2007, Funder and Colvin, 1988, Watson et al., 2000) in a phenomenon referred to as the “acquaintanceship effect” (Watson et al., 2000, p. 547). Meta-analytic research has found that informant-target relationship type (e.g., stranger, parent–child, friends, etc.) significantly moderates self-informant agreement along these lines (Connelly and Ones, 2010, Connolly et al., 2007). The spousal relationship is thought to be among the most familiar of interpersonal dyads (Allik et al., 2016, McCrae et al., 1998). Given that married couples presumably have ample opportunity to observe their partners’ behaviour across contexts and may also be more likely to share intimate details about their attitudes and perceptions of the world, informant-self agreement between spouses on traits should be relatively high. The aforementioned meta-analyses (Connelly and Ones, 2010, Connolly et al., 2007) support this notion, reporting that spouses have the highest agreement with target self-reported personality among informants.

Focusing specifically on married couples, relevant work by South, Oltmanns, Johnson, and Turkheimer (2011) examined multiple aspects of the relationship between self- and informant- ratings of non-normative personality (i.e., personality disorder symptoms) in a relatively small sample of couples (N = 82). In addition to finding modest self-informant agreement on pathological personality traits, South et al. (2011) also considered other aspects of the self- and informant-rated personality, including actual similarity (correlations between spouses’ self-reported personality) and assumed similarity (correlations between self-reported personality and informant-reported spouse personality). Actual trait similarity among couples is thought to reflect assortative mating (i.e., the idea that people select their mate based on similar personality traits). However, previous research has found little evidence of actual similarity among couples’ personality (Luo and Klohnen, 2005, Watson et al., 2000, Watson et al., 2004). While South et al. (2011) found little evidence of actual similarity based on spouses’ self-reported ratings of pathological personality, they did identify significant assumed similarity for these same traits.

Past work concerned with predicting relationship outcomes has considered whether spousal agreement on a given personality trait influences relationship satisfaction (Decuyper et al., 2012, Furler et al., 2014, Luo and Snider, 2009, Pollmann and Finkenauer, 2009, Stroud et al., 2010). However, as noted by South et al. (2011), examining whether spousal relationship satisfaction moderates agreement on personality is also important from a measurement standpoint. To date, there is little known about this issue. As we noted, married couples presumably spend a fair amount of intimate time together, generating ample opportunities for observation of each other’s behavior and thereby yielding greater agreement on traits. That said, this may not be the case among couples in less satisfied relationships. Conversely, couples in which partners have discrepant notions regarding their significant others’ personality may be less satisfied in their relationships. Thus, while the direction of causality may be complicated, it stands to reason that relationship satisfaction should moderate self-informant agreement on traits.

While unclear to date, relationship satisfaction may be most likely to moderate dyads’ self-informant agreement when the trait in question is strongly associated with relationship discord. In their meta-analysis Malouff, Thorsteinsson, Schutte, Bhullar, and Rooke (2010) found that greater relationship satisfaction was associated with low neuroticism, high agreeableness, high conscientiousness, and high extraversion. Along similar lines, Wilson et al. (2018) found that negative affect, detachment, disinhibition, and psychoticism were related to relationship dissatisfaction. It appears that traits related to emotional stability and conscientiousness/low disinhibition are particularly relevant to relationship satisfaction. Thus, agreement on these same traits may be moderated by relationship satisfaction.

However, relatively little work has been done in investigating the moderating effect of relationship satisfaction on spousal agreement for personality. While Kurtz and Sherker (2003) reported that relationship quality did not moderate self-informant agreement on personality in college roommates, such dyads differ from married couples in many ways. Also, Kurtz and Sherker (2003) considered only normative traits in a relatively small sample. In an older study looking specifically at this question, McCrae et al. (1998) did not find a moderating effect of relationship satisfaction on spouse agreement; however, this study used a relatively small sample and only considered agreement on a narrow range of normative personality traits.

In the current study, we aimed to replicate previous findings (e.g., Connelly and Ones, 2010, Connolly et al., 2007, South et al., 2011) showing modest associations between spouses’ self-reported personality traits (i.e., actual similarity), and larger associations between spouses’ own self-reported traits and their reports of their partners’ personality (i.e., assumed similarity). We also examined agreement between self- and informant-rated personality (i.e., agreement). Given previous literature (Connelly and Ones, 2010, Connolly et al., 2007, South et al., 2011), we expected low-to-moderate self-informant agreement on traits. More importantly, we aimed to extend past work by using a large sample of married couples to test whether informant-reported relationship satisfaction was associated with agreement between informant- and spouse self-reported personality across a broader array of personality traits. Put differently, the current study seeks to answer whether self-informant agreement on a spouse’s personality differs depending on the relationship satisfaction of the informant.

We considered spousal agreement on personality traits in a large, community-based sample of 376 heterosexual couples. The consensus within the field is that pathological personality can be understood in terms of extreme manifestations of normative traits (Krueger et al., 2011, Samuel and Widiger, 2008). Thus, in order to capture this, we included measures capable of tapping such extremes (i.e., the Schedule for Nonadaptive and Adaptive Personality Self/Other-Description Rating Form; Harlan & Clark, 1999) in addition to measures that tap more typical-range individual difference factors (i.e., the NEO Five Factor Inventory; Costa & McCrae, 1992). While the paucity of relevant past work rendered it challenging to make specific predictions, we were interested in the possibility that moderation of trait agreement by relationship satisfaction would vary based on the trait in question and whether wives or husbands served as informants. We suspected that agreement on traits related to emotional tendencies and conscientiousness (e.g., neuroticism, positive emotionality, disinhibition), which appear important in relationship satisfaction (Malouff et al., 2010, Wilson et al., 2018), might be impacted most strongly by relationship satisfaction.

Section snippets

Methods

Data and SPSS syntax files for analysis are publicly available and can be accessed via the following link: https://osf.io/83p52/. The research described in this paper was approved by the University of Western Ontario Non-Medical Research Ethics Board.

Descriptive statistics

Descriptive statistics for study measures are provided separately for husbands and wives (Table 1). Trait means and internal reliability generally resembled those drawn from other community samples (e.g., Bouchard and Arseneault, 2005, Brock et al., 2016, Graham et al., 2006, McCrae and Costa, 2004, Murray et al., 2003). Self-reported means for the NEO-FFI were consistent with previously reported values (McCrae & Costa Jr., 2004). Generally, husbands rated wives as significantly lower on all

Discussion

We sought to replicate and extend previous research on self-informant agreement on normative and extreme variations of personality in couples (e.g., South et al., 2011). Prior studies of influences on self- and informant trait agreement have largely focused on the moderating role of rater-target familiarity and trait observability and evaluativeness. Our findings were consistent with previous research in that more observable traits (e.g., extraversion) tend to have higher self-informant

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by research grants from the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR), including a Frederick Banting & Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships Doctoral Award (MRJV) and an Operating Grant (EPH).

Note: The authors do not have any competing interests to declare. This study was not preregistered with an independent or institutional registry. Data and SPSS syntax files for analysis are publically available and can be accessed via the following link: https://osf.io/83p52/.

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