Is It Adaptive for People With Personality Problems to Know How Their Romantic Partner Perceives Them? The Effect of Meta-accuracy on Romantic Relationship Satisfaction

Interpersonal Perceptual Tendencies and Adjustment in Chinese Adolescents: Testing the Mediating Role of Peer Relationship

Accuracy and assumed similarity are the most central topics in the research area of interpersonal perception. These two interpersonal perceptual tendencies have been demonstrated to have beneficial effects on adults' psychological functioning independently. However, how and why they influence adolescent psychological adjustment is less well-understood. The present research aimed to examine the mediating role of peer relationships in the association between these two interpersonal perceptual tendencies and psychological adjustment in adolescents. In the first study, a sample of adolescents in their first year of college (N = 93, 63% girls, Mage = 17.45 years, SD = 0.52) were recruited from a university located in Eastern China. They completed the likableness ratings of Anderson's 200 adjectives. The top 10 personality traits with the lowest and highest likableness values were selected to measure adolescents' personality profiles. In the second study, a round-robin design in a real-life setting, a sample of Chinese adolescents in grades six to nine were recruited from two middle schools (N = 337, Ndyads = 918, 47% girls, Mage = 13.76, SD = 1.15). They were requested to rate themselves and their peers within the same group on various factors. Results revealed that adolescents could form an accurate perception of their peers' personalities and concurrently assume that their peers' personalities are similar to their own. More importantly, accurate interpersonal perception and a biased tendency towards assumed similarity could, directly and indirectly, benefit adolescent psychological adjustment through peer relationships.

Do People Know How Their Romantic Partner Views Their Emotions? Evidence for Emotion Meta-Accuray and Links with Momentary Romantic Relationship Quality

Do people know how their romantic partner (i.e., the perceiver) views the self's (i.e., the metaperceiver's) emotions, displaying emotion meta-accuracy? Is it relevant to relationship quality? Using a sample of romantic couples (N_couples = 189), we found evidence for two types of emotion meta-accuracy across three different interactions: (a) normative emotion meta-accuracy, knowing perceivers' impressions of metaperceivers' emotions that are in line with how the average person may feel, and (b) distinctive emotion meta-accuracy, knowing perceivers' unique impression of metaperceivers' emotions. Furthermore, across interactions, normative emotion meta-accuracy was positively related to momentary relationship quality for metaperceivers and perceivers and this link was especially strong in the conflict interaction. Distinctive emotion meta-accuracy was negatively related to momentary relationship quality across interactions for perceivers and in the conflict interaction for metaperceivers. Overall, it may be adaptive for metaperceivers to accurately infer perceivers' normative impressions and to remain blissfully unaware of their unique impressions.