A post by Larissa L. Wieczorek
In late adolescence, individuals and their social networks both experience radical changes: graduation from school marks the end of childhood, signalling a time of personality maturation and adaption to new social roles. Social networks transform, new relationships gain importance while others have to be redefined. For example, most adolescents spend less time with their parents, but intensify their friendships and often find their first romantic partners. Faced with this multitude of changes, building and maintaining “good” relationships can be a challenging task. At the same time, strong social ties might be particularly important at this stage of life. It is therefore important to understand what contributes to late adolescents’ satisfying social relationships.
Two specific questions come to the personality researcher’s mind when trying to approach this topic. The first question is: What distinguishes people who are more satisfied with their social relationships from those who are less satisfied? From previous research, we know that higher extraversion, higher agreeableness, and lower neuroticism relate to positive relationship experiences. In a nutshell, people higher in extraversion find it easier to establish new friendships and to feel emotionally close to others. People with higher agreeableness have fewer conflicts and experience fewer problems with insecurity. Also, they tend to feel emotionally close to others and have more stable relationships. In contrast, people higher in neuroticism often struggle with feelings of insecurity, experience conflicts more frequently, and report less emotional closeness in their relationships. Thus, extraversion and agreeableness appear to be beneficial, whereas neuroticism has shown largely negative effects.
This leads to the second question: Why are people with these personality traits more (or less) satisfied with their social relationships? To address this question, it is helpful to identify a setting where we can observe peoples’ personalities and social relationships in everyday life: daily social interactions. There is general agreement in personality research that momentary, short-term processes in daily social interactions are a key element linking personality traits to social relationships. For example, one would expect that people with high extraversion differ from those with low extraversion in some aspects of their daily social perceptions and behaviors, leading to different levels of social satisfaction. Becausesocial perceptions and behaviors are inseparably interwoven within a person’s subjective experience, perceived momentary behaviors may represent an important link between personality and (momentary) satisfaction with social interactions. At this point, however, we know little about the specific perceptions of behaviors that may come into play here. Even less is known when thinking about the specifics of social interactions and perceptions in adolescence.
To gain a better understanding of the interpersonal perceptions that could explain the personality-social satisfaction interplay, we analyzed almost 3,000 daily social interactions reported by over 200 late adolescents in an experience sampling study. After providing ratings of their personality traits and facets, the adolescent participants received short questionnaires on their smartphones several times of the day over one week. In these questionnaires, they reported on their everyday social interactions: we asked adolescents how friendly, dominant, modest, etc. they found their own behavior and the behavior of their interaction partner and how satisfied they were with each social interaction. Participants were aged between 16 and 22 years (76% girls) and were in their final year of high school in Germany. All methodological and statistical details are available here. We analyzed the data in three steps: first, we examined how extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism are associated with momentary satisfaction in social interactions. Second, we explored based on adolescents’ ratings, which types of behaviors they perceived during their social interactions. Finally, we investigated how these perceived interpersonal behaviors might explain the association between personality traits and social satisfaction. In the following, I will elaborate on the findings from each of these steps.
How are personality traits related to momentary social satisfaction?
It appears that we can replicate the long-term associations between personality traits and broader relationship outcomes at the microlevel of social interactions: on average, adolescents with higher extraversion and higher agreeableness, reported more satisfying social interactions in their daily lives compared to those who score lower on these traits. Moreover, adolescents with lower neuroticism reported more satisfaction compared to those who score higher on the trait. Our findings support the idea that personality traits shape social relationships on a daily basic: if higher extraversion, higher agreeableness, and lower neuroticism relate to higher momentary satisfaction in multiple social interactions, this might ultimately accumulate into long-term relationship satisfaction.
When talking about personality traits, it is important to note that each trait subsumes several more specific facets: Extraversion can be divided into the facets sociability, assertiveness, and activity. Agreeableness comprises the facets compassion, respectfulness, and trust. Finally, neuroticism can be split into its facets anxiety, depression, and volatility. Whereas the personality trait summarizes a relatively broad range of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, corresponding facets provide higher predictive precision. In our study, associations seemed to be mainly driven by certain facets of each personality trait. Specifically, whether adolescents were more or less active, compassionate, or depressed appeared to be especially relevant for their daily social interactions. Only these respective facets of extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism emerged as consistent predictors of adolescents’ momentary social satisfaction. By contrast, being sociable and assertive, respectful and trusting, as well as anxious and volatile were not related to satisfaction with the social interaction in a consistent manner. Therefore, higher extraversion, higher agreeableness, and lower neuroticism were indeed predictive of higher social satisfaction, and these associations seemed driven by a person’s activity, compassion and depression, respectively.
Which social interaction behaviors do adolescents perceive?
Having examined who is most likely to feel satisfied in social interactions, we took a closer look at the individuals’ reports of interpersonal behaviors. Overall, we found that these perceptions grouped into three types of behavior: expressive, communal, and dominant behavior. It appears that adolescents in social interactions perceive themselves and others through the lens of these three dimensions. The first two behaviors each subsume a range of interaction behaviors, such as acting activated and sociable in the case of expressive behavior or acting friendly and modest in the case of communal behavior. In contrast, dominant behavior simply represents one specific interaction behavior.
Now that we know which behaviors adolescents perceive during their social interactions in general, we can further clarify how the perceptions of an individual are related to the behavior of their interaction partner’s behavior. The perceptions of expressive and communal behavior followed a principle called interpersonal correspondence: when adolescents perceived their own behavior as more expressive and communal, they also perceived the behavior of their interaction partner that way. For example, perceiving one’s own behavior as self-revealing co-occurred with perceptions of self-revealing behavior of the interaction partner. In contrast, perceptions of dominant behavior were characterized by the principle of interpersonal complementarity: when adolescents perceived their own behavior as more dominant, they felt that their interaction partner acted more submissive and the other way around. In sum, adolescents seemed to perceive three types of behavior during their social interactions (i.e., expressive, communal, and dominant behavior), and these perceptions differed from each other in terms of content, bandwidth, and/or interpersonal correspondence and complementarity.
What is the role of perceived social interaction behavior in explaining the association between personality traits and momentary social satisfaction?
Although we identified three types of interpersonal perceptions in late adolescents’ social interactions, only two of them were able to explain the associations between personality traits and momentary satisfaction with social interactions. Overall, adolescents were more satisfied when they experienced the behavior of both themselves and their interaction partner as more expressive or communal. In contrast, perceptions of dominant behavior did not explain interindividual differences in momentary social satisfaction. Importantly, the specific roles of perceived social interaction behaviors differed by personality trait.
In the case of extraversion and agreeableness, our results indicated that adolescents with higher levels of these traits were more satisfied with their daily social interactions because they perceived themselves and their interaction partners as acting more expressive and more communal. The same pattern was found for the respective personality facets activity and compassion. Potentially, higher social satisfaction in these individuals results from their tendency to act more expressive and communal themselves or from their tendency to trigger this type of behavior in their interaction partner. Alternatively, it could result from their tendency to interpret their own and the other person’s behavior in such terms, or from a combination of these processes.
In the case of neuroticism and its facet depression, our results indicated that adolescents with higher levels of this trait were less satisfied with their social satisfaction because they perceived themselves and their interaction partners as acting less expressive. Again, this could be because individuals with higher neuroticism act less expressive themselves, their interaction partners do so – or because they interpret their own or interaction partner’s interpersonal behaviors as less expressive. Of course, it could also be a combination of all these explanations. Perceptions of communal behavior, in contrast, played no relevant role in explaining the effects of neuroticism.
Contrary to expressive and communal behavior, perceptions of dominant behavior did not seem to contribute to the interplay between personality traits and social satisfaction. Adolescents who perceived themselves and their interaction partner as less dominant than usual were more satisfied with the social interaction at the momentary level. However, their general tendency to perceive more or less dominance was neither related to social satisfaction, nor to any personality trait. Therefore, different levels of perceived dominance did not explain why some adolescents tended to be more satisfied with their social interactions than others. It seems possible, however, that perceptions of dominant behavior are relevant to other, situational aspects of social interactions, which are not directly linked to a person’s personality traits. For example, acting more dominant than usual might help adolescents getting their way in a given situation and therefore relate to momentary satisfaction, independent of their general tendency to act more or less dominant.
It is important to note that interpersonal perceptions and social satisfaction were measured during the same experience sampling assessment, and we are unable to determine the sequence of these processes. That is, we cannot say with certainty whether adolescents’ interpersonal perceptions, as reasoned in our paper, “influence” their momentary satisfaction with the social interaction. Alternatively, the direction of effects may go in the opposite direction, such that adolescents’ social satisfaction affects which behaviors they perceive at that moment, or a bidirectional pattern could be at work here.
Outlook
In conclusion, what have we learned about who has more pleasant social interactions in adolescence and why this is the case? Our study showed that higher extraversion, higher agreeableness, and lower neuroticism predicted higher momentary social satisfaction – a pattern that is similar to how these personality traits are related to relationship satisfaction in the long-term. Regarding the second question, we found that the associations between personality traits and momentary social satisfaction might be explained by perceptions of expressive and communal interaction behaviors during the social interaction.
Altogether, our study offers important insights into the everyday social interactions of late adolescents. At the same time, there are still many questions that remain unanswered: what is the impact of situational characteristics, such as whether the interaction partner is a friend or a stranger? Can our findings be replicated? Do findings extend to different age groups?
To study interpersonal perceptions and behaviors, we think it is vital to observe them in their natural occurrence – in our study, we used experience sampling to gain insights in adolescents’ daily social interactions. Furthermore, we believe that differentiating between more nuanced personality facets is an important cornerstone in the effort to improve understanding of the interplay between personality traits and (momentary) social satisfaction. There is much to explore in future research, and we hope that the results of this study represent a promising starting point.