Predicting Subjective Well-Being from Personality: The Effects of Suppression, Confounding, and Mediating Variables

Abstract

This article presents a study examining 1) how personality predicts subjective well-being (SWB) and the possible suppression and confounding effects, and 2) the mediating role of fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption. This article addresses the lack of acknowledgment of suppressor variables in psychological research by illustrating the statistical methods and theoretical importance of identifying, classifying, and interpreting suppressor variables. This study employed a cross-sectional sample (N = 893) to identify and classify suppressor and confounding variables in the associations between Big Five personality (Big-5) and SWB. This study also examined the mediating role of FV consumption. The findings provided evidence for the suppression effect of openness and confounding effect of neuroticism in the associations between the Big-5 and SWB. The findings also demonstrated the importance of including all theoretically meaningful variables (including suppressor variables) in a model to accurately assess the contribution of each predictor. This study demonstrated that recognizing the presence of suppressor variables provided essential information for examining and interpreting the mediating role of FV consumption. This study also found that FV consumption significantly mediated the association from conscientiousness to SWB. Conscientiousness was positively associated with FV consumption, while FV consumption was positively associated with SWB. The findings provided preliminary support for targeting FV consumption as a form of intervention to enhance SWB, especially for those who are low in conscientiousness. This is the first article investigating suppression, mediating, and confounding effects in a single research article, and highlights the importance of accounting for these effects when testing models with multiple predictors.