ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Personality and Social Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1587405
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Power of Relationships in Human Development: From Prenatal Bonding to Attachment Across the LifespanView all 4 articles
Mapping love: a personality-centered network analysis of relationship satisfaction
Provisionally accepted
- University of Bern, Bern, Bern, Switzerland
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Previous research has linked various personality features to relationship satisfaction, primarily investigating bivariate effects. Given the interrelatedness of these personality features, their unique associations with relationship satisfaction remain unclear. The present study addresses this gap by exploring the holistic interplay of relationship satisfaction with related personality features and considering gender as a moderator. With an online self-report survey, relationship satisfaction, attachment, jealousy and trust, self-esteem, relationship self-efficacy, sexual satisfaction, and sociosexuality in 510 women and 300 men (Mage = 26.5 years) were assessed. Network analysis was used to estimate a combined network, while a network comparison test was used to examine gender differences. Insecure attachment, trust, mutuality, and sexual satisfaction uniquely correlated with relationship satisfaction within the combined network. Networks of men and women were largely similar. These results expand the understanding of relationship satisfaction and inform the ongoing debate on gender differences in psychological research.
Keywords: relationship satisfaction, Attachment, Jealousy, self-esteem, self-efficacy, sociosexuality, network anal ysis
Received: 04 Mar 2025; Accepted: 16 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Schulz, Gubler, Raemy and Troche. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Danièle Anne Gubler, University of Bern, Bern, 3012, Bern, Switzerland
Stefan Johannes Troche, University of Bern, Bern, 3012, Bern, Switzerland
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