Personality and temperament correlates of marital satisfaction

Participants (166 married couples, ages 20-85) were administered marital sa tisfaction and Pleasantness-Arousability-Dominance temperament scales. Part icipants with more pleasant and more dominant temperaments, and those who h ad mates with more pleasant temperaments, were happier in their marriages. Temperament accounted for substantially more variance (30%-34%) in marital satisfaction than effect sizes reported in the personality/ marital satisfa ction literature. Because Pleasantness is a general index of psychological adjustment, findings implied that better adjusted persons, and those with b etter adjusted mates, were more satisfied in marriage. Unpleasant and submi ssive (i.e., depressed) wives were highly dissatisfied in marriage. Althoug h intermate temperament similarity on Pleasantness and Dominance (but not o n Arousability) correlated positively with marital satisfaction, similarity was a weaker and somewhat misleading predictor of satisfaction in comparis on to findings when individual temperament scores were treated as separate variables. Also, weak results showed individuals selected mates with temper aments similar to their own.