Does your partner's personality affect your health?

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Williams, Lynn and Ashford-Smith, Sarah and Cobban, Laura and Fitzsimmons, Rebecca and Sukhatme, Vedika and Hunter, Simon (2019) Does your partner's personality affect your health? In: 33rd Annual Conference of the European Health Psychology Society (EHPS 2019), 2019-09-03 - 2019-09-07.

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Abstract

An individual’s own personality traits are powerful predictors of their health outcomes (Strickhouser, Zell, & Krizan, 2017). Few studies have addressed partner effects of personality on health, whereby the personalities of people close to us affect our health. We aim to (i) replicate previous findings of beneficial partner effects of conscientiousness (Roberts et al., 2009; Nickel, Iveniuk, & Roberts, 2017) and, (ii) examine partner effects of Type D (joint effects of negative affect and social inhibition) (Denollet, 2005) for the first time. These findings suggest that there are partner effects of conscientiousness on health, but not for the other Big Five traits or Type D. Extends evidence on the compensatory effects of conscientiousness to quality of life. Partners high in conscientiousness may provide their partners with useful health-related reminders (e.g. to take medication) and be reliable and consistent providers of social support.

ORCID iDs

Williams, Lynn ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2735-9219, Ashford-Smith, Sarah, Cobban, Laura, Fitzsimmons, Rebecca, Sukhatme, Vedika and Hunter, Simon ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3922-1252;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)