The association between personality, relationship satisfaction, and psychopathology in a three-wave, longitudinal study

Objective

The aim of this work was to better understand the role of personality as it relates to psychopathology, with satisfaction as a mediating variable.

Background

Personality is an important determinant of many life outcomes including relationship satisfaction and psychopathology. Previous work has demonstrated that broad domains of normal personality have low-to-moderate associations with various forms of psychopathology. Research has primarily focused on mechanisms that might explain how common personality traits put one at risk for common forms of psychopathology; this work builds upon existing work in examining relationship satisfaction as one possible mechanism. No study to date has examined whether relationship satisfaction mediates the connection between personality and psychopathology.

Method

We utilized multilevel modeling in a longitudinal sample of 100 newlywed couples to test the hypothesis that major domains of personality (positive temperament, negative temperament, disinhibition) have a significant effect on relationship satisfaction which, in turn, is significantly associated with internalizing and externalizing forms of psychopathology.

Results

We found no evidence for the mediating role of relationship satisfaction; however, in exploratory analyses, we did find evidence for both between-person and within-person effects of personality on psychopathology.

Conclusions

This study confirms the role of personality as an important factor in consideration of dyadic processes, though not entirely deterministic for downstream functioning. Thus, separate factors in addition to personality may be worth examining in consideration of how low relationship satisfaction may be associated with psychopathology.