Allison Dai

Maladaptive personality traits have been found to be generally associated with interpersonal dysfunction in romantic relationships. However, more specific aspects of the nature of this dysfunction in other important relationship domains, such as parent-child and larger family relationships, have yet to be examined. I leverage already collected data in a sample of 106 pairs of adult twin mothers (mean age = 37.94 [SD = 2.87]; 100% female, 100% monozygotic) and their young children (N = 176) in the Children of Twins (CoT) study at the Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research (MCTFR) to examine associations between maladaptive personality traits and functioning in the romantic, parent-child, and family relationship domains. The multi-informant assessment approach allows me to extend beyond twin mothers’ self-reports to also consider their children’s ratings of the quality of their relationships. Moreover, because maladaptive personality traits and interpersonal interactions are naturally reciprocal and subject to gene-environment influences, it has been difficult to determine whether associations are causal. Because Monozygotic (MZ; “identical”) co-twins share both genes and environmental experiences, meaning that any differences between them necessarily reflect nongenetic, nonshared environmental experiences. I extend beyond the typical cross-sectional study design by taking advantage of a “naturally” occurring control within a correlational framework. It is an important step to add to the growing research on the manifestation of maladaptive personality traits in interpersonal contexts and extends our knowledge on potential causal effects within romantic and family contexts.