Feeling low and lonely: Personality traits, love styles, and social rejection

Abstract

To better understand how personality traits related to interpersonal functioning, we considered (N = 308) the possibility that personality leads to certain love styles which then lead to social rejection in the forms of low self-esteem and high loneliness. We focused here on the Five Factor model derived from the DSM (i.e., psychoticism, antagonism, disinhibited, negative affect, and detachment) to augment work on the traditional Big Five. All measured personality traits were connected to ludus, storge, pragma, and mania love styles. Moreover, each trait was associated with lower levels of self-esteem but higher levels of loneliness. We showed that these personality traits may be associated with problematic love styles which in turn lead to more social rejection. We interpret out results using sociometer theory.