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Abstract:
A naturalistic diary study was conducted to investigate the degree to which agreeableness and neuroticism moderate emotional reactions to conflict and nonconflict problems. Healthy community-residing males made diary recordings at the end of each of 8 successive days concerning problem occurrence and daily mood. Consistent with predictions based on person-environment fit, participants who scored higher in agreeableness experienced more subjective distress when they encountered more interpersonal conflicts than did their less agreeable counterparts. Neuroticism was related to a small but consistent reactivity to both conflict and nonconflict problems, contrary to person-environment fit. Reasons for the differences in the affective dynamics of agreeableness and neuroticism are discussed.
Lewin (1935) was one of the first to promulgate the notion that people react best to situations in which their characteristics are similar to other individuals or features of the environment and react worse to situations in which there is a mismatch. This notion, commonly known as person-environment fit (see also Angyal, 1941), has a long tradition, especially in the counseling and industrial psychology literatures (Kristof, 1996).(1) Less attention has been given to the role of fit in producing emotional states. A contemporary version of Lewin’s notion, Diener, Larsen, and Emmons’s (1984) situational congruence model, proposes that individuals should experience more positive affect in situations that are compatible with their personality characteristics (see also Emmons, Diener, & Larsen, 1986). Recently, Moskowitz and Cote (1995) proposed a variant of the situational congruence model such that people experience pleasant affect when they engage in behaviors concordant with their traits and unpleasant affect when they engage in behaviors discordant with their traits.
In the present article, the concept of person-environment fit, in conjunction with contemporary personality theory and research, was used to formulate hypotheses about emotional reactions to interpersonal conflict. The focus was on conflicts with other people, in part, because research indicates that these are among the most frequent and potent sources of distress in daily life (Bolger, DeLongis, Kessler, & Schilling, 1989). We tested whether personality-environment fit provides a viable explanation for reactions to interpersonal and noninterpersonal problems for persons varying in agreeableness and neuroticism, two dimensions of the five-factor model of personality (Digman, 1990; Goldberg, 1981; John, 1990; McCrae & John, 1992). Agreeableness and neuroticism are relevant because several alternative hypotheses can be tendered about their role in moderating reactions to conflict and other kinds of problems, as described below. In conceptualizing conflict as part of the environment, we acknowledge that individuals are not merely passive victims but frequently play an active role; nonetheless, by definition, the “other” or the social environment figures prominently in interpersonal conflicts.
Agreeableness refers to the person’s degree of positive or negative orientation toward others (Costa & McCrae, 1985). Individuals who score high in agreeableness–on inventories such as the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI; Costa & McCrae, 1985), Goldberg’s (1992) self-rating markers, or John, Donahue, and Kentle’s (1991) Big Five Inventory–tend to be trusting, helpful, sympathetic, and cooperative with others. Low-agreeable (i.e., disagreeable or antagonistic) people tend to be rude, uncooperative, and manipulative (Costa, McCrae, & Dembroski, 1989). Based on these descriptions, person-environment fit models predict that persons high in agreeableness should react more aversely to interpersonal conflict because conflict should represent a greater mismatch of their interpersonal orientation than for disagreeable persons. Consistent with this hypothesis, Moskowitz and Cote (1995) found that people high in agreeableness (measured in the interpersonal circumplex model of personality; Wiggins, 1979) experienced more unpleasant affect when they engaged in behaviors opposite to their traits (e.g., being sarcastic or quarrelsome).
The opposite prediction–that disagreeable persons will be more reactive to conflict–can be derived, however, from the health psychology/behavioral medicine literature. Some researchers posit that persons prone to anger and hostility tend to exhibit exaggerated physiological reactivity to provocation. This hypothesis has been proposed as an explanation for associations between trait anger and heart disease risk (Dembroski, MacDougall, Costa, & Grandits, 1989; Williams et al., 1980). Persons classified as low in agreeableness, because of their manipulative and egocentric orientation toward others (Costa & McCrae, 1985), exhibit more pronounced cardiovascular responses to hostile provocation in the laboratory than do agreeable persons (Smith, 1992; Suls & Wan, 1993). For example, participants scoring high versus low on the Cook and Medley (1954) Hostility Scale, who were harassed by an experimenter while performing mental arithmetic problems, showed greater blood pressure and heart rate reactivity and reported more subjective distress (Suarez & Williams, 1989). This literature is not entirely consistent, however. Everson, McKey, and Lovallo (1995) found that both irritability and physiological arousal were elevated in hostile participants who were harassed; but correlations between affect and physiological responding were small and nonsignificant among the high-hostile participants, leading the authors to suggest there may be a dissociation between negative affect and cardiovascular reactivity (see also Burns, 1995). Thus, previous evidence is inconsistent concerning whether disagreeable persons experience more negative feelings in response to conflict than do more agreeable persons. In addition, laboratory reactivity paradigms do not identify unambiguously whether patterns of reactivity represent a reaction to provocation per se or to provocation in the context of motivated task performance. The ambiguity results from the fact that, in all of the available studies, participants were harassed while performing some other task, such as mental arithmetic or persuasion.
From a different area of study, Graziano, Jensen-Campbell, and Hair (1996) found that agreeable persons (using Goldberg’s [1992] markers of personality) generated more positive perceptions and attributions of provocative behavior than did their disagreeable counterparts. This led Graziano et al. to speculate that agreeable persons may respond to conflict with less negative affect. Thus, both the hostility-physiological reactivity literature and Graziano et al.’s research suggest, contrary to person-environment fit, that disagreeable persons may react to conflict with greater negative affect than do their agreeable counterparts.
The present study used a diary recording methodology to examine these alternative hypotheses and determine whether agreeable persons respond more or less aversely to naturally occurring interpersonal conflicts than do their disagreeable counterparts. We also examined emotional reactivity to nonconflict problems to ascertain whether the same pattern applies to other types of problems. Because agreeableness is supposed to be primarily an interpersonal orientation, person-environment fit would not predict that agreeableness should moderate the effects of nonconflict problems. However, agreeableness has a substantial affective component (Carp, 1985; McCrae, & Costa, 1991; Suls, Green, & Hillis, in press). Hence, if highly agreeable people have the need to maintain positive affect, then even nonconflicts may be especially bothersome. The present study permitted the opportunity to examine whether agreeableness plays a role in reactions to both conflict and nonconflict problems.
Neuroticism, another dimension of the five-factor model, refers to a person’s degree of emotional stability versus adjustment (Costa & McCrae, 1985). Persons who score high in neuroticism tend toward excessive worrying and feelings of insecurity, distress, and personal inadequacy. Low scorers tend to be calm, relaxed, secure, and self-satisfied. How does person-environment fit apply to persons high in neuroticism? Because neurotic individuals have negative views of self, the world, and others (Watson & Clark, 1984), both interpersonal conflicts and other kinds of problems should not challenge their expectations or assumptions; in other words, there should be congruence between self-conceptions and negative outcomes. Indeed, Swann’s (1983) self-verification theory proposes that maintenance of one’s self-conceptions is essential for epistemic and pragmatic reasons (see also Swann, Wenzlaff, Krull, & Pelham, 1992). According to these accounts, neurotic individuals should actually prefer negative outcomes or, at least, be less distressed by them than are less neurotic persons. Thus, person-environment fit makes the prediction that nonneurotic individuals should be more distressed by conflict and nonconflict problems than their neurotic counterparts.
The above prediction contrasts, however, with theoretical accounts that view neuroticism (see Eysenck, 1967; Gray, 1981; Streslau, 1987; Tellegen, 1985) as a hypersensitivity to punishment and negative events. Also, Brown and Dutton (1995) observed that persons with negative views of the self should experience reactivation of previously unpleasant events and feelings when they receive negative feedback. This suggests that neurotic persons should be highly distressed by both interpersonal and noninterpersonal problems of daily life. Thus, neurotic individuals may not strive for fit with their personalities; neuroticism may represent a potentially important boundary condition for the person-environment fit conception, at least as it pertains to emotional states. Indeed, laboratory and naturalistic diary studies report evidence of more negative reactions to negative feedback among persons who are either high in neuroticism or low in self-esteem (Bolger & Schilling, 1991; Bolger & Zuckerman, 1995; Larsen & Ketelaar, 1991; Marco & Suls, 1993; Suls et al., in press; Swann, Griffin, Predmore, & Gaines, 1987). There has been no study, however, that has examined the possibility that person-fit may apply to some individual differences, such as agreeableness, but not to neuroticism. By measuring reactions to both conflict and nonconflict events, we studied how the affective dynamics of daily life differ for neurotic and agreeable individuals.
In sum, the present study examined opposing predictions regarding agreeableness and neuroticism and their role in emotional reactivity to conflict and nonconflict events as they occur in daily life. A naturalistic diary methodology (Stone & Schiffman, 1994; Suls & Martin, 1993; Tennen, Suls, & Affleck, 1991; Wheeler & Reis, 1991) was employed with a sample of community residents. This procedure allowed us, in addition, to assess whether agreeableness and neuroticism were related to the frequency of conflict and nonconflict events in everyday life. Lewin (1935) and others (Diener et al., 1984; Snyder & Gangestad, 1982) proposed that people not only adapt better in environments that fit but also select or create situations congruent with their characteristics. Descriptions of agreeableness and neuroticism from the five-factor model of personality suggest that persons high in agreeableness should report fewer conflicts and nonconflict problems; persons higher in neuroticism should report both more conflicts and more nonconflicts (Magnus, Diener, Fujita, & Pavot, 1993).
METHODS
Participants
Community-residing, nominally healthy males between 35 and 55 years of age were recruited through newspaper ads for a diary study. Persons were excluded if they had been diagnosed with a chronic health condition (e.g., high blood pressure, heart disease) or if they were taking medications such as anti-hypertensives or other mood-altering drugs. A registered nurse (one of the authors) made the final eligibility judgment.
This sample represented a subset of subjects from a larger project on psychosocial risk factors for heart disease among healthy males, involving several hundred subjects. The 84 participants included here participated in a nightly diary study; an additional 14 subjects failed to complete all of the diaries or showed no variance on at least one of the critical independent or dependent variables. (We used a multilevel analytic approach [Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992] that requires there be variation in responses across days for each participant.) The final sample had an average age of 42.4 years (SD = 5.6). Of the participants, 95% (n = 80) were White, and 71% (n = 60) had at least 16 years of education. A total of 68% (n = 57) were married, 19% (n = 16) were divorced, 4% (n = 3) were single with a partner, and 10% (n = 8) were single without a partner. Of the participants, 80% (n = 67) had an annual family income between $21,000 and $80,000, and 85% (n = 71) worked full-time.
Measures
Undesirable daily events. At bedtime for 8 consecutive nights, participants completed the Daily Life Experience (DLE) inventory (see Stone & Neale, 1982), a checklist of 87 daily events arranged in outline form according to six categories (work, leisure, family/friends, financial, school, and other). Stone and Neale (1982) constructed the DLE through a long process of item selection and revision, and the DLE was designed specifically for use in daily prospective studies. There is good evidence for its construct validity as a measure of daily events (see Stone, 1981; Stone & Neale, 1982). Some examples of events are “obstacle, delay or other difficulty at work,” “praised for a job well done,” “visit with a friend,” “had an assignment due,” and “illness or injury to self.” Participants indicated whether an event occurred in the last 24 hrs and rated its valence on a 6-point scale ranging from 1 (extremely desirable) to 6 (extremely undesirable). For present purposes, we were interested only in the events rated as undesirable (i.e., given ratings of 4, 5, or 6).
Identifying conflict events. Each of the three authors read through the diary and identified items that related to conflicts with others. After joint consultation, the following events were classified as involving conflict: (a) criticism for job performance, lateness, and so on; (b) work-related events that were frustrating or irritating (negative emotional interactions and/or happenings with coworkers, employees, supervisees, and/or clients); (c) firing or disciplining someone; (d) problems getting along with a relative; (e) problems getting along with a friend; (f) problems getting along with a neighbor; (g) not getting along well with spouse; (h) arguments with spouse or reprimand to or from spouse; (i) disciplining child (ren); and (j) negative emotional interaction with child(ren). In each case, the event referred to a negative interaction or disagreement with another person or persons.
Each participant’s diaries were coded for the total number of undesirable events (as indicated by ratings on the 6-point scale) reported on each day of the recording series. In addition, a total index of daily conflict events was computed based on the list of 10 events identified by the authors. Separate analyses were computed to assess whether personality had differential roles for conflict versus others kinds of undesirable daily events.
Daily mood. The daily diary also contained a series of mood items to assess negative affect experienced across the day (Mood Adjective Checklist; Nowlis, 1965). Negative mood items included tensed, unhappy, irritated, angry/ hostile, worried/anxious, and depressed/sad. Each mood item was rated on a 6-point scale (ranging from 0 = definitely does not apply to your feelings for the day to 6 = definitely describes your feelings during the day). These mood items were taken directly from Stone and Neale’s (1982) diary and, with one exception (depressed/sad), assess the high-arousal/unpleasant octant of the circumplex of emotions (Larsen & Diener, 1992; Russell, 1980). The ratings of the six negative mood items were averaged to obtain a negative mood index for each day. Cronbach’s alpha for the negative mood index was .94. Nightly mood reports based on these scales have been found to be reasonable representations of the average mood experienced throughout the day (Hedges, Jandorf, & Stone, 1985).
Neuroticism and agreeableness. Neuroticism and agreeableness were assessed with the corresponding scales of the NEO PI (Costa & McCrae, 1985). The NEO PI (Form S) consists of 181 items answered on a 5-point scale. It is a well-validated and widely used measure of the five-factor model of personality consisting of the following five dimensions: neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The participants’ average scores were 80.24 (SD = 25.85) and 47.64 (SD = 7.35) for neuroticism and agreeableness, respectively. Agreeableness and neuroticism scores were correlated significantly (r = -.43, p [is less than] .01). Although the factors of the Big Five are conceptualized as independent (Costa & McCrae, 1985), intercorrelations between some of the dimensions tend to be moderate to high; other samples reveal correlations ranging from -.20 to -.50 (Costa & McCrae, 1985; Martin, 1996; Suls et al., in press) between agreeableness and neuroticism.
Procedure
Research participants provided demographic information and completed the NEO PI. Several days later, they began diary recording. Research participants were instructed to complete a diary each night at bedtime for 8 consecutive nights and to base their responses on the previous 24 hr. To minimize misunderstandings, the experimenter reviewed each page of the diary with the participant, who then completed a practice diary during the laboratory visit. Participants were encouraged to fill out a diary each night; however, they were advised to complete a diary as soon as possible the following morning if they had failed to do so the previous night. Based on participants’ reports, 90% of the diaries were completed on time at the end of the day. A telephone number was provided for anyone who had questions during the 8-day recording period. Diaries were returned to the laboratory at the end of the recording period. Participants received compensation of $50 for their efforts.
RESULTS
Descriptive Information
Table 1 presents descriptive information concerning the average frequencies of daily undesirable events (which include conflict and nonconflict problems), conflict events, nonconflict undesirable events, and average daily negative mood. Participants reported nearly three problem events per day. Consistent with past reports (Bolger et al., 1989), interpersonal conflicts occurred less frequently (.78), somewhat less than once per day, than nonconflict problems.
TABLE 1: Descriptive Statistics for Daily
Problem Occurrence and Mood
Variable M SD
Total daily problems 2.95 2.55
Daily conflicts 0.78 1.01
Daily nonconflict problems 2.17 1.99
Negative daily mood 1.55 1.31
NOTE: Mood ratings could range from 0 to 6;
higher ratings indicate more negative mood.
Associations Between Event Frequencies and Personality
Previous research suggests that persons scoring higher in neuroticism report more problems of all kinds (Clark & Watson, 1988; Magnus et al., 1993). No prior studies have presented data regarding the frequency of conflict as a function of agreeableness. Table 2 presents the zero-order correlations between agreeableness, neuroticism, and frequency of total problem events, problem events involving conflict, and problems excluding conflicts. Persons scoring higher in neuroticism tended to report more conflict problems, r = .33, p [is less than] .01, and more total problems, r = .28, p [is less than] .01. The latter correlation was not the result of the neurotic participants simply having more conflicts, because the correlation between neuroticism and number of nonconflict problems was also significant, r = .22, p [is less than] .05.
TABLE 2: Correlations Between Agreeableness and Neuroticism
and Frequency of Daily Undesirable and Interpersonal
Conflict Events
Frequency of
Undesirable Nonconflict
Trait Events Conflicts Problems
Agreeableness -.20(*) -.32([dagger]) -.12
Neuroticism .28([dagger]) .33([dagger]) .22(***)
(*) p < .07.
(***) p < .05.
([dagger]) p < .01.
As predicted, more agreeable participants reported fewer conflict problems, r = -.32, p [is less than] .01. There was a marginally significant tendency for more agreeable individuals to report fewer total problems, r = -.20, but when conflict problems were excluded, agreeableness was nonsignificantly associated with problem reports. In sum, level of agreeableness was inversely related to reports of conflict but not to other kinds of problems.
Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Reactions to Conflicts
The diary data have a multilevel structure because each diary recording can be considered a lower level observation nested under the upper level unit, persons. In the present study, we used hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), which treats both lower and upper level (persons) units as sampling units, so that inferences can be made to both observations and persons (Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992). In this approach, an estimation of the effects of problem event occurrence is calculated separately for each participant. In subsequent steps, the variability of the estimated parameters (i.e., slopes and intercepts) of the individual coefficients is modeled with individual attributes (e.g., agreeableness and neuroticism scores). A multilevel approach using maximum likelihood estimation is especially appropriate because the frequency of problem events differed as a function of personality (see above), which would violate the assumption of equal numbers of observations in ordinary least squares regression. Also, although the number of recording days was the same across participants, the number and timing of problem events, of course, varied across individuals. In HLM, a random term is included that represents the effect of diary clustering under participants. This approach also calculates parameter estimates through a process that provides greater weight to participants who provide more information. In summary, HLM provides separate estimates of the relationship between daily problem events and negative mood for each participant and then evaluates the degree to which between-participant variables–that is, agreeableness and neuroticism–account for differences in the relationship among persons (see also Bolger & Zuckerman, 1995; Suls et al., in press).
To assess whether there was differential emotional reactivity, we first constructed a model at the within-participant level. In this model, all variables were centered around the group mean, in accord with Bryk and Raudenbush (1992) and Kreft, de Leeuw, and Aiken (1995). The model assumed, first, that number of conflicts on a particular day would be (positively) associated with more negative mood. Also, because lagged effects of mood appear in some diary data (Larsen & Kasimatis, 1991; Marco & Suls, 1993), such that mood at time t-1 predicts mood on the next occasion t, the model also included negative mood of the previous day (t-1). Hence, the within-person model was as follows:
[Mood.sub.t] = [a.sub.0] + [a.sub.1][M.sub.t-1] + [a.sub.2] [C.sub.t] + [e.sub.t],
where [Mood.sub.t] is negative mood at time t;, [M.sub.t-1] is negative mood on the preceding day; [C.sub.t] indicates the number of conflict events on day t;, [a.sub.0] is the intercept (i.e., mood for days on which the subject had an average level of conflict and that were preceded by an average mood); [a.sub.1] is the slope for prior-day mood (i.e., the number of units higher in negative mood on day t for each unit higher in negative mood at day t-1); [a.sub.2] is the slope for problems, or the reactivity effect (i.e., the number of units higher in negative mood on day t associated with the occurrence of conflicts at t); and [e.sub.t] is a random component of mood on day t. It should be noted that HLM enters all of the predictors (i.e., number of conflicts and prior-day mood) simultaneously to establish unique effects.(2)
The second, between-subject, level of the model describes the degree to which individual differences among participants may account for variability in the size of the individual betas for the effects of prior mood and daily conflicts on mood. Therefore, the between-subject model has two parts, one that refers to the effects of prior mood and the other that refers to the effect of conflicts (or reactivity):
[a.sub.2i]=[b.sub.0] + [b.sub.1][A.sub.i] + [b.sub.2][N.sub.i] + [s.sub.i].
In this model, it is proposed that each participant’s reactivity slope, [a.sub.2i], is a function of an intercept, agreeableness and neuroticism components, and a random component. Because agreeableness and neuroticism scores were centered, the intercept [b.sub.0] represents the expected change in negative mood associated with the occurrence of problems on day t for a persons whose agreeableness and neuroticism levels are average. The slopes, [b.sub.1] and [b.sub.2], indicate whether agreeableness and neuroticism, respectively, accounted for some significant portion of the variation in mood in response to conflicts.
The second part of the between-subject model is similar, except that agreeableness and neuroticism are used as potential predictors of the effects of prior-day mood, [a.sub.1i]. That is, a person’s score on either or both of the personality dimensions may moderate the effects of prior mood. Such an effect has been found for neuroticism (i.e., bad mood was more likely to carry over to the next occasion) in a study of mood changes across different times of the same day (Suls et al., in press). Lag effects across days, however, are less frequently found (Stone, Neale, & Schiffman, 1993), but they were assessed here.
The HLM analyses (see Table 3) indicated that there were overall (intercept) differences in negative mood (see Table 3, row 1), [Beta] = +1.50, t = 17.08, p [is less than] .0001, across the sample. The standard deviation of the intercepts was 0.73; the within-subject intercepts ranged from .24 to 2.99. Consistent with other research (Watson & Clark, 1984), overall differences in negative affect were captured significantly by between-subject differences in neuroticism, [Beta] = +.02, t = 4.75, p [is less than] .0001. Level of agreeableness did not account for overall differences in mood.
TABLE 3: Multilevel Regression Predicting Daily Negative Mood
From Interpersonal Conflict Frequency and Prior-Day
Negative Mood (with Agreeableness and Neuroticism as
Moderators)
Predictor [Beta] SE t Ratio
Intercept +1.50 .088 17.08([double dagger])
Agreeableness +0.008 .003 <1
Neuroticism +0.02 .004 4.75([double dagger])
Interpersonal conflict +0.45 .06 7.37([double dagger])
frequency
Agreeableness +0.03 .008 3.96([double dagger])
Neuroticism +0.004 .002 1.71
Prior-day mood +0.007 .05 <1
Agreeableness +0.12 .007 1.73
Neuroticism +0.001 .002 <1
NOTE: df = 81. The regression model consisted of an intercept,
interpersonal conflict frequency, and prior-day negative mood. The
table shows the betas for each predictor and also betas representing
the degree to which agreeableness and neuroticism account for variation
in the betas for each predictor.
([double dagger]) p < .0001.
There was an effect of number of daily conflicts, [Beta] = .45, t = 7.37, p [is less than] .0001, such that daily mood was worse on days when more conflicts occurred. The within-subject betas ranged between -1.60 and 1.98, SD = .22. More important, differences in agreeableness accounted for some of the variability in the slopes across participants, [Beta] = +.03, t = 3.96, p [is less than] .0001. The positive sign of the coefficient indicates that participants who scored higher in agreeableness responded more negatively to conflict than did participants who scored lower, in accord with the person-environment fit prediction. Table 3 also indicates that neuroticism captured some variation in individual slopes; persons who were higher in neuroticism were somewhat more distressed by conflicts. The effect was smaller ([Beta] = +.004, t = 1.71, p = .09) than for agreeableness and was only marginally significant. The pattern is worth noting, however, because it both replicates Bolger and Schilling (1991), Bolger and Zuckerman (1995), and Marco and Suls (1993) and suggests that person-environment fit does not account for emotional reactions to conflict among persons varying in neuroticism. …
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