You’ve just had an argument with your partner, and you’re sure that
you’re not the one at fault. You were simply trying to carve out some
time for yourself to sit down and get a project done in the few minutes
you had before getting home and needing to cook dinner. However, your
partner demands instead that you use this precious time to discuss the
family finances. The matter doesn't seem urgent, and it appears that
your partner just wants to talk. This is just one in a string of
incidents in which you feel that your partner is intruding on your
priorities. The question becomes, then, are you just being too selfish,
or is your partner too demanding and controlling?
Relationships involve a constant give-and-take between
the desires of each partner for both self-expression and intimacy. According to a recent paper
by University of California Davis psychologist Christopher Hopwood and
Michigan State University’s Evan Good, problematic relationships result
when people bring their own personal difficulties into play, but at the
same time are overly sensitive to the problems of their partners.
Interpersonal sensitivity, in the view of Hopwood and Good, is a quality rarely examined by personality
psychologists, but one that can play a major role in relationship
difficulties. As the authors note, “the literature on personality,
relationship functioning, and well-being has been focused primarily on
individual differences in the way a person behaves, paying relatively
little attention to the perceived impacts of others’ behavior.”
The authors use what is called an Interpersonal Circumplex (IPC)
model to understand relationship problems from the perspectives of the
person’s own qualities and the person’s perception of others. To
understand the IPC, imagine a circle with two straight lines
intersecting right in the middle at 90-degree angles. One line
represents the dimension of warmth, ranging from affectionate to remote,
and the other is dominance, ranging from controlling to passive. An
additional set of two dimensions intersects with these, yielding another
four qualities (two sets of two polar opposites). These two dimensions
range from meanness to niceness, and socially avoidant to
attention-grabbing. Altogether, there are eight personality qualities
created by the four dimensions, and these form the framework represented
by the IPC.
Your personality, in the terms used by the IPC, can be described by
exactly where you fall within these four dimensions. This is the
personality that you bring to your relationships and which forms part of
the equation in understanding
the source of interpersonal difficulties. For example, you might have a
mean streak or be too likely to give in to other people, at least in
the ways you describe yourself. However, your personality also includes
the sensitivity that influences how you interpret the ways in which
other people interact with you. Maybe you are especially annoyed by
meanness in others. As in the example when your partner wants to spend
time with you that you feel you can’t spare, it may be that you’re
hypersensitive to being controlled by other people, who, in all
likelihood, don’t mean you any harm. In this case, you would rank high
on the “sensitivity to control” end of the dominance sensitivity
dimension. The IPC, as applied to your sensitivity to the personalities
of others, identifies your “hot buttons.”
Using measures of both personality problems and personality
sensitivities, Hopwood and Good hoped to be able to explain the
variations among people in their scores on a range of measures that
tapped their personality traits, personality disorders, and their self-reported health, tendency toward alexithymia (difficulty expressing emotions), experiences in relationships, and impression management
tactics. The first in the two studies involved nearly 1,000
undergraduates (80 percent female) who completed online questionnaires.
The purpose of this study, more specifically, was to determine
whether the structure of people’s own self-rated personality traits
correlated with the structure of their sensitivities. In other words,
are people high in self-described dominance also likely to be irritated
by people they perceive to be overly controlling? Do mean people feel
ticked off when they’re in the presence of people they perceive as
similarly antagonistic? Participants completed the IPC measures both in
terms of their own characteristics and in terms of behaviors in other
people that bother them.
The findings of this first study confirmed that the IPC self-ratings
and ratings of sensitivities actually fit into the circumplex
structure. The findings also showed that people who had more
interpersonal problems had more sensitivities, and that people tended to
be most sensitive to those who had an interpersonal style opposite to
their own. This means that domineering people may be really bothered by
people who are pushovers. People high in dominance also scored
relatively high on the narcissism measure, extraversion, depression, and the tendency to be flamboyant.
In the second study, a sample that was similar in size and
composition completed online questionnaires that included
“other-focused” versions of the self-rated personality trait measures
from the first study. Thus, in addition to providing ratings according
to the IPC, participants rated the extent to which certain traits and
behaviors bothered them when observed in other people. You might be
asked, then, to indicate how bothered you are by people high in such
traits as conscientiousness and neuroticism, as well as such seemingly innocuous traits as agreeableness
and openness to experience. One measure also asked participants to rate
how bothered they were by people with high scores on the narcissism
questionnaire. The findings showed that, as predicted, people with high
interpersonal sensitivities showed sensitivity to those traits as seen
in other people.
The overall findings support the proposal by the authors that, in
their words, “knowing the way a person views her own behavior and how
she views others’ behavior is important for a comprehensive
understanding of her personality, personality problems, and relationship
functioning." This study has taken a novel approach to showing that
problems in relationships represent a two-way street, or perhaps even a
three-way street. You contribute to problems by virtue of your own
characteristics, but also by virtue of your sensitivities to the
problems of other people’s personalities. Finally, perceiving
partners as having certain traits can add to your interpersonal woes.
To sum up, personality is not a quality that exists
in isolation within any given individual. We project our own personality
problems onto others, but also interpret the traits of other people in
terms of our own preferences for the qualities of others. The next time
you find yourself annoyed by your partner's behavior, this study
suggests you should truly ask “whether it’s you or me.”
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