Perceptions of marital interaction as mediators of personality effects on marital satisfaction.

Abstract

This thesis explores links between personality and marital satisfaction, looking at the effects a spouse's personality may have upon the marital satisfaction of his or her marital partner. The focus is upon the extent to which a respondent's perception of his or her spouse's marital interaction behavior mediates the relationship between spouse's personality and respondent's marital satisfaction. A longitudinal survey of the early years of marriage provides a representative sample of 131 white and 110 black urban newlywed couples. Emotional stability of spouses is indexed by self-reports of Anxiety and Zest, with the average Year 1 and Year 3 scores used as predictors of perceived interaction and marital satisfaction. Marital Satisfaction is assessed by respondents' global evaluations of marital quality, including marital happiness, satisfaction, and perceptions of relationship stability. Dimensions of marital interaction investigated include: Affective Affirmation, Sexual Interaction, Withdrawal, Spouse Power, Disagreements, and Constructive and Destructive Conflict styles. For white couples, multiple regression analyses reveal that wives' Anxiety is a negative predictor and wives' Zest is a positive predictor of husbands' Marital Satisfaction. However, husbands' Anxiety and Zest are only weakly related to white wives' Marital Satisfaction. For both black and white couples, Affective Affirmation mediates the effects of wives' Anxiety and Zest on husbands' Marital Satisfaction. However, significant direct effects of wives' Zest on husbands' Marital Satisfaction remain even after taking into account perceptions of interaction. For white couples, husbands' perception of wives' Destructive Conflict style mediates the effects of wives' Anxiety, and Frequency of Disagreements mediates the effects of wives' Zest on husbands' Marital Satisfaction. For black couples, however, neither Destructive Conflict or Frequency of Disagreements were significant mediators of the effects of wives' Anxiety or Zest. Comparing findings for white and black couples suggests that examining a wider range of socioeconomic and subcultural groups will allow marital interaction researchers to gain a better perspective on fundamental relational processes.