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Know yourself before you know your friends

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 into 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 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.
The quality of 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. 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.  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. Your personality also includes the sensitivity that influences how you interpret the ways other people interact with you. Maybe you are especially annoyed by meanness in others.
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?
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.  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 behaviours 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.
The overall findings support the proposal by the authors that, in their words, "knowing the way a person views her own behaviour and how she views others' behaviour 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.
-Psychology Today
Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D., is a Professor Emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst