ABSTRACT
P eople’s judgments of their own and of others’ personality may be embed-ded in their motivation to navigate close relationships. Personality has long been assumed to be interpersonal (e.g., Carson, 1969; Leary, 1957) and contextually bound in ways relevant to relationships. In this view, attempts to understand personality without reference to interpersonal context are likely to be futile. Likewise, a number of classical theories of personality place emphasis on relationships-with signifi cant persons (e.g., Fairbairn, 1952; Horney, 1939; Sullivan, 1953), and such interpersonal approaches are also of an active interest in clinical theory and research (e.g., Blatt & Zuroff, 1992; Davila, Hammen, Burge, & Paley, 1995; Hammen, 2000; Horowitz, 1991; Safran & Segal, 1990). Relationships are of major importance in social psychology as well-a resurgence of interest has emerged in interpersonal relationships and constructs focused on, for example, mental representations of signifi cant others. Indeed, it has been argued that “[a]ll personality dimensions are apt to have interpersonal aspects or expressions, so purely intrapersonal accounts of them fail to capture essential aspects of personality” (A. P. Fiske & Haslam, 2005, p. 290).
