Arousal, personality, and assortative mating in marriage: generalizability and cross-cultural factors

The significant assortative mating for the sensation-seeking motive in (married) American students reported by Farley and Davis was significantly cross validated on American (N = 160) and German (N = 160) samples randomly selected from two comparable cities in the Federal German Republic and the United States. A control condition of age-matched unmarried pairs was included. Spouses were found to have 19% and 29% of sensation-seeking variance in common in the American and German samples, respectively. The later figure is exceptionally high for the literature on assortative mating (exceeding or approximating some of the relationships found for intellectual measures). No significant variance was in common for the unmarried pairs. When a simple and easily measured construct with such wide implications as the sensation-seeking motive can be shown to be so significantly involved in marital partner similarity, then its consequences for successful and unsuccessful marriage should be pursued with vigor. Such a program in research and therapy is recommended and a theoretical model suggested.