Affect and personality as predictors of conflict and closeness in young adults' friendships

We examined the relations of affect and personality to qualitative aspects of young adults' friendships. Members of 131 friendship dyads evaluated the quality of their relationships and kept diaries of the conflicts they expe rienced during a 4-week period. Positive and negative affect (PA and NA) em erged as independent predictors of the extent to which people felt close to their friends, of how much irritation they felt toward one another, and of the amount of conflict reported during the recording period Extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness also predicted measures of friends hip quality. The data suggest that variations in affectivity are robust pre dictors of qualitative aspects of people's social relationships. (C) 2000 A cademic Press.