Category: Personality

Some personality types are reliably more happy after getting married.

Introverted women are more satisfied with life for longer after marriage, research finds.

However, men who are introverted gain the least in the long-term from being married, with extraverted men gaining the most from marriage.

Introverted men were actually less happy, on average, after getting married than men who had never married.

These personality trends are a fascinating kink in the orthodox view of marriage’s effect on happiness.

Normally, people feel happier for a period before and after getting married, but this fades away after a couple of years — they may even feel worse than before marriage.

But earlier studies didn’t take into account personality.

Along with the findings for extraversion, the study also discovered that conscientious women were more satisfied with life after marriage than those who were less conscientious.

Conscientious people are disciplined, dutiful and good at planning ahead.

The study’s authors write:

“Such a result might be explained by the tendency for conscientious individuals to place more value on relationship goals and therefore conscientious individuals may strive harder to ensure success.

This result is consistent with conscientious individuals being more satisfied with their relationships.”

Why this should not also be true for conscientious men is not clear, although it could be down to men and women having different relationship goals.

The results come from a German survey that followed 2,015 people over eight years.

In this time, 468 got married for the first time and stayed that way until the end of the study.

Tracking their happiness, the researchers found that it followed the usual trend.

People got happier as they were about to get married, but then this faded away in the year or two after the big day.

The drop in happiness was sharper for men, particularly for introverted men, the authors write:

“Whilst all men experience a pre-marital increase in their life satisfaction, men that are extraverted seem to experience longer-term benefits to their life satisfaction during marriage.

Introverted men, however, experience significant drops in their life satisfaction that result in them being approximately 0.20 SD [standard deviations] lower in life satisfaction than those who never marry.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Boyce et al., 2016).

What happens in the brain when readers strongly identify with fictional characters.

People who enjoy fantasising are most likely to lose themselves in fiction, new research finds.

Those high in fantasising — or ‘trait identification’, as the researchers call it — experience strong involvement with the feelings and actions of characters in books, plays and movies.

They may feel as though they actually are one of their favourite fictional characters, experiencing their emotions and imagining how it would feel if those events were happening to them.

The more people get immersed in fiction, the more they use a part of the brain to think about fictional characters that they use to think about themselves.

The study involved 19 fans of the book and TV show ‘Game of Thrones’, who were asked to pick their favourite character

Their brains were scanned while they thought about themselves, a friend or a Game of Thrones character.

The results showed that people high in trait identification (fantasising) showed higher activation in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, which is implicated in how we think about ourselves and close friends.

The area of the brain was particularly active when people thought about the character they identified with the most.

Mr Timothy Broom, the study’s first author, said:

“People who are high in trait identification not only get absorbed into a story, they also are really absorbed into a particular character.

They report matching the thoughts of the character, they are thinking what the character is thinking, they are feeling what the character is feeling.

They are inhabiting the role of that character.”

The study helps show why fiction can be so powerful for some people.

Dr Dylan Wanger, study co-author, said:

“For some people, fiction is a chance to take on new identities, to see worlds though others’ eyes and return from those experiences changed.

What previous studies have found is that when people experience stories as if they were one of the characters, a connection is made with that character, and the character becomes intwined with the self.

In our study, we see evidence of that in their brains.”

→ Read on: Fiction can change your behaviour, fiction can increase empathy and your favourite fictional villain can reveal your personality.

The study was published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (Broom et al., 2021).