Browsing by discipline "Persoonallisuuspsykologia"

Goals Personality traits are related to a person’s wellbeing and important events in life, such as an intimate relationship. Most people have an intimate relationship or relationships during their lifetime. Personality traits play an important role in a functioning relationship because a person’s relationship satisfaction is affected by his/her own personality traits and those of his/her spouse’s. Satisfaction has remarkable consequences since it correlates to, for instance, life satisfaction. The relation between personality and relationship satisfaction has been a subject to a plenty of research but, for example, the relation between extroversion or openness to experience and relationship satisfaction is still unclear. The goal of my study is to clarify the relations between the Big Five personality traits of two intimate partners and their relationship satisfaction, and whether gender, relationship status or relationship length moderate these relations. In addition, I study the relation between the similarity of a couple’s personality traits and their relationship satisfaction. Methods Fifty-nine test subjects and their spouses participated in the study, totalling 118 people. A majority of the test subjects consisted of women (n = 55), and most of the spouses were men (n = 50). The average age of a test subject was 25,6 years and that of a spouse was 27,4 years. The average relationship length was 2–5 years. The test subjects and their spouses self-assessed their own personality traits and relationship satisfaction. In addition, the spouses assessed the personality of the respective test subject. Connections between personality traits and relationship satisfaction were studied using Person’s correlation coefficients and multilevel modelling. Results and conclusions Emotional stability, extroversion and openness to experience were perceived to be in connection with relationship satisfaction. Gender and relationship length modified the perceived relations. My study helped to clarify previously contradictory connections between extroversion, openness to experience and relationship satisfaction.