The mediating role of emotional expressiveness in the relationship between Hexaco personality traits with internet betrayal in students

According to the cognitive-behavioral approaches in family-related issues, personality and emotional factors play a significant role in the type of tendency of couples to infidelity. This research was conducted to investigate the mediating role of emotional expressivity in the relationship between HEXACO personality traits and internet infidelity in college students.

This descriptive research is a correlational type based on structural modeling. The statistical population of this research was all 324 married female students in the nursing faculty of Babol University in the academic year of 2021-2022. Two hundred and fifty samples were selected via simple random method. Internet Infidelity Questionnaire (IIQ), HEXACO Personality Traits Questionnaire (HEXACO), and King and Emmons Emotional Expressivity Questionnaire (EEQ) were used to collect data. To analyze the results, the Pearson correlation method and structural equations were used with SPSS 18 and AMOS 23 software.

In the study of demographic information, 148 female nursing students were 19-20 years old, and 102 were 21-22 years old in this method in some proposed countries. In terms of employment, 187 people were employed, and 63 were unemployed. Also, 127 students were employed in the 2nd to fifth semesters and 123 in the 6th to eighth academic semesters. The average sales of Internet Infidelity were 93.62±9.43, HEXACO personality traits 57.97±6.77, and emotional expressiveness 34.68±6.56 (Table 1). The results of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test were higher than the 0.05 level in HEXACO's personality traits, emotional expressiveness, and Internet infidelity, so the normality of the data was confirmed. The results of the correlation matrix between the variables showed a significant correlation between the variables of HEXACO's personality traits and emotional expressiveness with Internet infidelity (Table 2). Specifically, there is a significant negative correlation between honesty-humility (-0.24), emotionality (-0.22), extroversion (-0.20), agreeableness (-0.25), conscientiousness (-0.23), openness to experience (-0.27) and an overall score of HEXACO personality traits (-0.33) were associated with Internet Infidelity. It showed a negative correlation between positive emotion expression (-0.25), intimacy and substance (-0.22), negative emotion expression (-0.20), and emotional expressiveness (-0.29) with Internet infidelity which was significant at the 0.01 level. The value of RMSEA was equal to 0.037, so this value was less than 0.1, which indicated the appropriateness of the mean squared errors of the model, and the model was acceptable. Also, the chi-square value for the degree of freedom was between 1 and 3 (2.445), and the amount of GFI, CFI, and NFI index was almost equal and more than 0.9 (0.999) showing that the model for measuring the research variables was suitable. All paths of HEXACO personality traits and emotional expressivity significantly explained 0.119 and 0.093 of the common variance of Internet infidelity (Table 3). The indirect path of HEXACO's personality traits on Internet infidelity was observed through the mediation of emotional expressiveness. In general, the path could separately predict 0.39 of the Internet infidelity variable; these variables could explain 39 percent of this endogenous variable, and 61 percent of the Internet infidelity variable was explained by other variables outside the research (Table 4). In examining the direct and indirect effects of HEXACO's personality traits and emotional expressiveness on Internet infidelity, the research model was confirmed with a total effect coefficient of -0.46 (Chart 1).

Emotional expressivity can be a negative and significant mediator in the relationship between HEXACO personality traits and internet infidelity in college students.