Personality doesn't give success in love

Psychology professor Glenn Roisman and graduatestudent Ashley Holland say that while personality has been found to bepredictive of perceived relationship satisfaction and success, other measures ofrelationship quality may offer additional insight into how a romanticrelationship is functioning. ���Obviously there are going to bestrong links between how you perceive your relationship and how you perceiveyourself. But maybe there are not going to be such strong links between how youperceive yourself and how well you actually interact with your partner,���said Holland, who led the research as part of her master���sthesis.���Our question was whether personality traits getreflected not just in how people perceive their relationships, but actually howthey���re behaving toward one another ��� and how their bodies respondwhile they interact,��� added Prof. Roisman, a co-author on thestudy.For their study, the researchers gave dating, engaged andmarried participants a questionnaire about their own and their partners���personalities and the quality of their relationships. The subjectswere asked to indicate where they fell on a spectrum of each of the ���bigfive��� personality traits: extroversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness,agreeableness and openness to experience. This part of the analysisconfirmed that how an individual describes his own personality characteristicscorresponds to how satisfied or dissatisfied he is in his romanticrelationship.The team also compared the self-reported data to thatobtained by observation and specific physiological measures. Trainedobservers watched videotapes of study participants as they discusseddisagreements and agreements in their relationships, and coded each person onhis or her positive and negative behaviours, such as smiling or scowling,avoiding or making eye contact, and so on. All participants weregiven final scores that reflected the balance of positive and negativebehaviours and attributes observed. The researchers also measuredparticipants��� heart rate and skin conductance, a gauge of how much aperson sweats, during their interactions. ���Both heart rate andskin conductance have been linked to a host of important outcomes ininterpersonal relationships, including the likelihood of divorce. It���s aproblem if you need to inhibit yourself greatly while having a conversation withyour partner about the kinds of things that you would ordinarily be talkingabout and trying to resolve in your daily lives,��� Roismansaid.The researchers found that the way the participants describedthemselves and their relationships was not strongly linked to how they behavedtoward one another in the laboratory, which suggested that those studyingrelationships might need to look deeper than what individuals report aboutthemselves and their romantic partners.���Romantic relationshipsare complex and multi-faceted, and, therefore, measuring the quality of romanticrelationships should probably include a variety of approaches in order to get amore nuanced view of how the relationship is functioning,��� Hollandsaid.The study has been published in the Journal of Social andPersonal Relationships.