The puzzle of personality, partners, and well-being with Dr. Rebekka Weidmann
February 8, 2023 - Shelly DeJong
Dr. Rebekka Weidmann, a research associate in the MSU Department of Psychology, studies how personality relates to well-being in individuals, couples, and families. Originally from Switzerland, Dr. Weidmann received her PhD at the University of Basel, where she was involved in a 3 generational study on co-development and personality. The study looked at personality and relationships between couples but also at parents and children.
Through this study, Dr. Weidmann saw that personality develops across the lifespan and is not set in stone. She took this interest in personality development and combined it with her lifelong interest in relationships. A large focus of her work now is on if and how partners influence each other's personality, health, and happiness from a longitudinal perspective.
“As a society, we place so much importance on finding the right one. There are algorithms and apps that match us supposedly with the perfect partner,” said Dr. Weidmann. “But I don’t think it is as straightforward as we might think. Research has not yet a clear answer about how large a partner’s effect is on someone’s personality, health, and well-being. That puzzle keeps me interested in this work.”
After receiving a Postdoc Mobility Fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation in 2020, she and her partner and toddler moved to Michigan so she could work with Drs. Bill Chopik, Rich Lucas, and Brent Donnellan
Last year, she and Dr. Chopik published a paper titled, “Romantic attachment, stress, and cognitive functioning in a large sample of middle-aged and older couples.” In the study, they examined the link between insecure attachment and cognitive functioning in a study of over 1,000 couples. They found that anxiously attached people, those who may be scared that their partner might leave them, rated their cognitive health lower. They also found that people with avoidant partners, meaning partners that may not often share their feelings or are more independent, performed worse on an objective test on their cognitive health.
Dr. Weidmann’s Largest Project Yet
Dr. Weidmann is currently working on her largest project yet. By using publicly available data from the Health and Retirement Study and its sister studies, she has data from 36 nations with over 64,000 couples to see how depressive symptoms predict self-rated health and objectively-tested cognitive health across cultures. In the surveys, both couple members were asked about the depressive symptoms and self-rated health. Their cognitive health was also measured objectively through a word recall test.
Through this data, she can measure if one person’s depressive symptoms are linked to their own self-rated health and cognitive health, but also see if it is linked to their partner’s self-rated health and cognitive health—and they can see if there are cultural differences.
“This particular study is really cool because it is dyadic data, so we can see a relationship from both partners’ perspectives,” said Dr. Weidmann. “We can’t explain all the variations, but we are exploring to see if relationship length and quality might play a role. For example, if a couple is very close or they’ve been together for 40 years, is it worse or better for them if their partner is depressed in terms of how they feel and how they cognitively develop?”
In the future, Dr. Weidmann hopes to work with data of couples that are at higher risk of separation to help combat the intrinsic selection bias that she faces in her work. Because research has found that people aren’t apt to participate in a study about couples when they are thinking about breaking up.
“If I talk to long-term couples, they are already a special sample because they didn’t break up,” explained Dr. Weidmann. “Those relationship dynamics are not common for short-term couples or couples that don’t want to engage in relationship studies because they are nearing a separation.”
The Personality Podcast
For the last two years, Dr. Weidmann has been collaborating with René Mõttus, the Editor of the European Journal of Personality, and Lisanne de Moor, the communications editor of the Journal on the Personality Psychology Podcast.
They interview personality researchers every month about a diverse set of topics including self-esteem, well-being, narcissism, and recently an episode about spirituality. They strive for a balance of female-male researchers and interview early career scholars all the way up to renowned researchers in the field.
To hear a familiar MSU psychology voice, Dr. Weidmann recommends checking out episode 5 about subjective well-being.