Social Relationships, Personality, and Subjective Well-Being: Investigating Social Processes Across Different Methods and Temporal Resolutions (Dissertation)

Abstract

Based on the assumption that social relationships are universally important to human well- being, this dissertation investigates the role of individual differences in different social contexts. Three empirical studies investigate the longitudinal interplay between personality, well-being, and social relationships at different temporal resolutions and using various assessment methods. Study I investigated the psychological consequences of becoming a grandparent, an understudied topic in personality development in late adulthood. Representative panel data from the Netherlands and the United States were used to analyze how personality and life satisfaction of first-time grandparents changed during the transition to grandparenthood. Propensity score matching was employed to address confounding. In contrast to expectations based on the social investment principle, results generally showed mean-level stability of the Big Five personality traits and life satisfaction over the transition to grandparenthood, and no consistent moderation by gender, employment, or providing grandchild care. There was no evidence of lower rank-order stability in grandparents compared to matched controls or of larger interindividual differences in change. The findings are discussed in relation to recent critical re-examinations of the social investment principle. Study II examined the regulation of social needs during governmental contact restrictions that differed in situational strength over time. The study analyzed how changes in social contact frequency over time (personal and indirect contact) and associated well-being (life satisfaction, depressivity/anxiety) were moderated by the four social traits affiliation motive, extraversion, need to be alone, and social anxiety. Individual differences in the affiliation motive and need to be alone moderated the resumption of personal contact under loosened contact restrictions. Changes in life satisfaction and depressivity/anxiety associated with increased personal contact frequency differed depending on the need to be alone and social anxiety. The findings provide insight into how social traits influenced the resumption of personal contact during times of contact restrictions and contribute to the understanding of individual differences in the relation between social need regulation and well-being. Study III focused on the question how social dynamics in daily life relate to momentary affect. In confirmatory analyses, social oversatiation (i.e., being in contact but desiring to be alone) was associated with decreased positive affect (PA) and increased negative affect (NA), whereas social deprivation (i.e., being alone but desiring contact) was unrelated to affect. Exploratory analyses revealed that a higher desire to be alone was consistently related to decreased affective well-being, whereas a higher desire for social contact was related to increased affective well-being. Out of the different indicators of social contact derived from passive mobile sensing measurements, having more conversations than usual was related to higher PA even when controlling for desire to be alone. Conversely, using communication apps more frequently than usual when alone was related to higher NA. Implications for dynamics in social need regulation and the benefits of combining experience sampling and mobile sensing measures are discussed. The findings contribute to the understanding of both long-term personality development in the context of social investment and short-term personality processes in daily-life social need regulation. It is discussed how future research can integrate the perspectives of personality processes and personality development based on the results of this dissertation and on an inclusive framework of personality along domains of affect, behavior, cognition, and desire. Finally, the dissertation demonstrates and discusses how multi-method intensive longitudinal data that combine active experience sampling and passive behavioral assessments through mobile sensing may overcome previous limitations in research on dynamic social processes, which potentially drive personality development.