| Description |
Couples were recruited to report their attitudes, traits, health, relationship quality, and their perception of their partners' attitudes and traits. Using multilevel models (MLMs), we examined actor and partner effects for three types of partner knowledge: support preferences familiarity, attitude familiarity, and trait familiarity. We found that partners' social support preferences familiarity was related to greater perceived support, while actors' support preferences familiarity was associated with greater negative affect. Actors' attitude familiarity was related to higher perceived support, greater relationship satisfaction, and positive affect. Actors' trait familiarity was linked to greater perceived support, relationship satisfaction, higher positive affect, lower negative affect, and lower depression. We also examined whether differences in familiarity between partners was associated with poorer outcomes regarding our dependent variables. We found that differences between partners in support preferences familiarity was not related to relationship quality or health, while larger differences in attitude familiarity were only associated with greater negative affect, and larger differences in trait familiarity were associated only with lower relationship satisfaction. Finally, we studied the relationships between the personality variables of agreeableness, narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism and partner knowledge. It was found that partners' agreeability was related to greater trait familiarity and partners' narcissism was associated with greater support preferences familiarity. The other personality variables were unrelated to partner knowledge. Additionally, when we examined the associations between our partner knowledge variables and dependent variables while controlling for these personality traits, the results were not significantly affected. |
