Using Response Surface Analysis to Interpret the Impact of Parent–Offspring Personality Similarity on Adolescent Externalizing Problems

Abstract

Personality similarity between parent and offspring has been suggested to play an important role in offspring's development of externalizing problems. Nonetheless, much remains unknown regarding the nature of this association. This study aimed to investigate the effects of parent–offspring similarity at different levels of personality traits, comparing expectations based on evolutionary and goodness‐of‐fit perspectives. Two waves of data from the TRAILS study (N = 1587, 53% girls) were used to study parent–offspring similarity at different levels of personality traits at age 16 predicting externalizing problems at age 19. Polynomial regression analyses and Response Surface Analyses were used to disentangle effects of different levels and combinations of parents and offspring personality similarity. Although several facets of the offspring's personality had an impact on offspring's externalizing problems, few similarity effects were found. Therefore, there is little support for assumptions based on either an evolutionary or a goodness‐of‐fit perspective. Instead, our findings point in the direction that offspring personality, and at similar levels also parent personality might impact the development of externalizing problems during late adolescence. © 2017 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology

Uncovering the Power of Personality to Shape Income

“…Advantages of RSA over traditional approaches included (a) the retention of variance both within and between job levels, (b) the retention of information about the levels of both personality- and job-related variables when determining the effect of personality-job fit, (c) the use of the entire range of values of the independent variables, and (d) the ability to model quadratic effects. The method has recently been used by a variety of authors to address research questions about personality-environment fit (e.g., Bleidorn et al, 2016 ; Boele, Sijtsema, Klimstra, Denissen, & Meeus, in press ; Franken, Laceulle, Van Aken, & Ormel, 2017 ). Polynomial regression models were implemented in R, using the lme4 package ( Bates, Mächler, Bolker, & Walker, 2014 ).…”

Testing Similarity Effects with Dyadic Response Surface Analysis

“…RSA is gaining momentum as a tool in the personality literature. For example, recent publications investigated the effects of personality similarity on romantic attraction at zero acquaintance (Olderbak, Malter, Wolf, Jones, & Figueredo, 2017), relationship intensity in a network analysis (Ilmarinen, Vainikainen, Verkasalo, & Lönnqvist, 2017), effects of parent-offspring personality similarity on externalizing problems (Franken, Laceulle, Van Aken, & Ormel, 2017), or person-group dissimilarity in personality on peer victimization (Boele, Sijtsema, Klimstra, Denissen, & Meeus, 2017) and self-esteem (Bleidorn et al, 2016). Detailed overviews of further potential applications of RSA can be found in Table 1 in Barranti, Carlson, and Côté (2017) and in Table 1 in Humberg et al (2018).…”

Uncovering the power of personality to shape income

“…Advantages of RSA over traditional approaches included (a) the retention of variance both within and between job levels, (b) the retention of information about the levels of both personality-and job-related variables when determining the effect of personality-job fit, (c) the use of the entire range of values of the independent variables, and (d) the ability to model quadratic effects. The method has recently been used by a variety of authors to address research questions about personality-environment fit (e.g., Bleidorn et al, 2016;Boele, Sijtsema, Klimstra, Denissen, & Meeus, in press;Franken, Laceulle, Van Aken, & Ormel, 2017). Polynomial regression models were implemented in R, using the lme4 package (Bates, Mächler, Bolker, & Walker, 2014).…”