Within-Couple Personality Concordance Over Time: The Importance of Personality Synchrony for Perceived Spousal Support
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Within-couple similarities in personality traits tend to be positively associated with relationship well-being. However, research in this area is typically based on cross-sectional designs, thereby limiting examination of longitudinal personality concordance. Given that life experiences shape within-person change in personality, and that partners within a couple often experience similar life events, investigation of within-couple personality synchrony and associations with marital outcomes is warranted. METHODS: Using data from 3,988 couples (mean age at baseline = 67.0 years, SD = 9.6), multilevel dyadic growth models estimated within-couple similarity in baseline levels, change, and occasion-to-occasion variability for each of the Big Five personality traits over an 8-year follow-up. Bivariate growth models examined the effect of within-couple similarity on perceived spousal support, accounting for dependency within couples. RESULTS: Adjusting for baseline age, education, functional ability, and relationship length, analyses revealed within-couple concordance between baseline levels of all 5 personality traits, as well as correlated within-couple fluctuations in neuroticism, extraversion, and openness over time. Similarity in openness, agreeableness, and neuroticism trajectories predicted spousal support. Couples were most similar in openness, showing correlated intercepts, change, and variability, and this longitudinal synchrony was particularly important for perceived spousal support in women. DISCUSSION: These findings provide evidence for longitudinal personality synchrony over time within older adult couples. Further, concordance in neuroticism, extraversion, and openness predicted perceived spousal support, though there may be some gender differences in personality dynamics and relationship well-being. Effects of similarity were relatively small compared to actor and partner effects of these traits.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".