Supportive relationships are linked to positive personality changes

An 8-month study of university students found that those receiving autonomy support from others tended to experience small improvements in subjective well-being. They also showed slight increases in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. The paper was published in the Journal of Personality.

Autonomy support from others refers to interpersonal behaviors that nurture a person’s sense of volition and psychological freedom rather than controlling or pressuring them. It is a central concept in the psychological macrotheoretical framework called Self-Determination Theory.

Autonomy support involves acknowledging another person’s perspective, even when you disagree with it. It includes offering meaningful choices instead of imposing directives, and providing rationales for requests so the person understands the purpose behind them.

Autonomy-supportive individuals avoid guilt, shame, threats, or conditional approval as motivational tools. They communicate confidence in the other person’s capacity to decide and act competently. In educational and organizational settings, autonomy support has been linked to higher intrinsic motivation and better performance. In close relationships, it fosters trust, authenticity, and psychological well-being.

Study author Élodie Audet and her colleagues wanted to examine the relationship between autonomy support for important personal goals from close individuals and personality traits, as measured by the Big Five framework, along with subjective well-being.

The Big Five is a widely accepted model of personality that organizes individual differences into five broad dimensions: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The authors hypothesized that perceived autonomy support would be associated with future changes in personality traits and with enhanced subjective well-being.

Study participants were 1403 university students. Their average age was approximately 20.5 years. About 82% of them were women, 57% were White, and 38% were Asian. Students were recruited across 4 different academic years, from 2016 to 2020. Within each of these school years, study participants completed 6 waves of data collection.

The participants first identified two close individuals who supported their goal pursuits and described their relationships. After this, they assessed their perceptions of the level of support from these individuals. On top of that, students recruited in the last academic year of the study (2019-2020) were asked to nominate a friend and a family member who could provide additional data. The nominated individuals completed brief surveys about how much they engaged in autonomy-supportive behaviors towards the study participant who nominated them.

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In addition, study participants completed assessments of the Big Five personality traits (the 44-item Big Five Inventory) and subjective well-being (assessed through life satisfaction and the frequency of pleasant and unpleasant emotions).

The results showed that individuals reporting higher autonomy support from others tended to report better subjective well-being and to be slightly more conscientious, agreeable, open to experience, extraverted, and emotionally stable (a negative association with neuroticism).

However, when the authors looked at changes in well-being and personality traits between the first and the last assessment of the study, results showed that individuals receiving higher autonomy support from others tended to experience small enhancements in their subjective well-being over the study period, as well as slight increases in agreeableness, openness to experience, and conscientiousness.

Overall, both personality traits and subjective well-being tended to be very stable across the studied period.

“This investigation provides compelling evidence that autonomy-supportive relationships play a formative role in shaping both personality traits and well-being during young adulthood. Autonomy support was related to increases in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience across the academic year, alongside meaningful gains in subjective well-being. These patterns were further corroborated by informant reports, strengthening the robustness of the findings,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the role autonomy support plays in the psychological development of individuals. However, it should be noted that, although this is a longitudinal study, its design does not allow any definitive causal inferences to be derived from the results.

The paper, “Autonomy Support, Personality Traits, and Subjective Well-Being,” was authored by Élodie Audet, Anne Holding, Jérémie Verner-Filion, Ben Thomas, Amanda Moore, and Richard Koestner.