Love, Sex, and Personality Pathology: A Life History View of Personality Pathologies and Sociosexuality

Abstract

Love and sex are fundamental needs of most people, yet little research has examined such aspects of life in relation to personality pathologies. We examined the associations between pathological personality traits (i.e., negative affectivity, disinhibition, antagonism, psychoticism, and detachment) and sociosexuality (i.e., short-term mating orientation, long-term mating orientation, and sexual behavior) among 702 university students. In addition, we examined the mediating role of life history speed and tested whether sex moderated the associations that these pathological personality traits had with sociosexuality. Detachment, antagonism, disinhibition, and psychoticism had positive associations with short-term mating interests and negative associations with long-term mating interests. Life history speed mediated the associations that detachment and disinhibition had with short-term mating orientation and long-term mating orientation. Although sex did moderate the association that negative affectivity had with previous sexual behavior, we found no evidence that these mediational processes differed between men and women. Results are discussed in terms of the way personality traits shape the sociosexuality of men and women using a life history paradigm.

Notes

¹ The results of additional analyses that included the 49 participants who were excluded due to inattentive responding revealed patterns that were extremely similar to the results that are reported for the final sample of 702 participants. That is, excluding the data for the 49 inattentive participants did not have a substantive impact on the results of the study

² The pathological personality traits had significant intercorrelations for both men (rs > .36, ps < .001) and women (rs > .16, ps < .001).

³ The values for Cohen’s d were reduced by no more than .03 when we adopted Hedges’s g, which suggests that the relatively large number of women in the study did not distort the results.