Category: Mind & Brain

New York Daily News
A new study finds that newlyweds know on a subconscious level whether their marriage will be a happy one or not, and that when it comes to tying the knot, listen to your gut instincts.

Florida State University scientists recruited 135 heterosexual couples who had been married for less than six months and then followed up with them every six months over a four-year period.

They found that the feelings the study participants verbalized about their marriages were unrelated to changes in their marital happiness over time. Instead, it was the gut-level negative evaluations of their partners that they unknowingly revealed during a baseline experiment that predicted future happiness, the researchers said.

The study was published November 29 issue of the journal Science.

“Everyone wants to be in a good marriage,” said head researcher James K. McNulty. “And in the beginning, many people are able to convince themselves of that at a conscious level. But these automatic, gut-level responses are less influenced by what people want to think. You can’t make yourself have a positive response through a lot of wishful thinking.”

To conduct the experiment, the researchers asked subjects to report their relationship satisfaction and the severity of their specific relationship problems. Subjects also were asked to provide their conscious evaluations by describing their marriage according to 15 pairs of opposing adjectives, such as “good” or “bad,” “satisfied” or “unsatisfied.”

Most interesting to the researchers, though, were the findings regarding another measure designed to test their automatic attitudes, or gut-level responses. The experiment involved flashing a photo of the study participant’s spouse on a computer screen for just one-third of a second followed by a positive word like “awesome” or “terrific” or a negative word like “awful” or “terrible.” The individuals simply had to press a key on the keyboard to indicate whether the word was positive or negative.

By Meeri Kim
The Washington Post
The harbinger of an unhappy marriage may be your gut.

A new study by psychologists found that newlyweds had underlying positive or negative gut feelings about their spouses that many were unaware of and that predicted marital satisfaction years later.

The experiment used a photo of the newlywed spouse and a series of positive and negative words to elicit a so-called automatic attitude.

“Either people are completely unaware of this automatic attitude, or they’re completely aware and just not willing to talk about it,” said psychologist and study author James McNulty of Florida State University. The study was published online Thursday in the journal Science.

Automatic attitudes are unfiltered, knee-jerk reactions that can sometimes oppose the conscious thoughts.

McNulty, who primarily conducts research on romantic relationships, showed a newlywed the photo of his or her spouse for just a third of a second, followed by a word that was positive or negative: “delightful” or “disgusting,” for instance. The newlywed, as fast as possible, had to push a button indicating the word that was good or bad.

Psychologists say that seeing the photo for just long enough to recognize who you’re looking at, but not enough to study the detail of the picture, causes your brain to automatically retrieve from memory any associations you have. This facilitates a speedier response to any words that match those associations.

By Steve Connor
The Independent
Oscar Wilde once said that marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Now scientists have shown that the best advice for people contemplating matrimony is to put their gut instinct ahead of wishful thinking.

A study of 135 newly-wed couples who were followed over a four-year period found that what people say about their partner is not always what they think deep down – but it is this gut reaction that matters for future marital happiness.

The optimism shown by all the couples at the outset of their marriage generally declined over time but the level of growing dissatisfaction with their spouse was directly related to the inner-most feelings at the outset – which they actively suppressed, the scientists found.

Those who harboured the most negative gut reaction to their partners after six months of marriage were also the ones who felt the most dissatisfied and unhappy after four years of marriage, according to Professor James McNulty of Florida State University in Tallahassee, who led the study published in the journal Science.

“Everyone wants to be in a good marriage and in the beginning many people are able to convince themselves of that at a conscious level,” Professor McNulty said.

“But these automatic, gut-level responses are less influenced by what people want to think. You can’t make yourself have a positive response through a lot of wishful thinking,” he said.

Measuring gut feelings was not straightforward and the researchers used an established psychological technique for determining someone’s subconscious thoughts by measuring the time it took for them to react to photographs of a spouse.

The experiment involved flashing a photograph of someone’s partner on a computer screen for just one third of a second, followed by a positive word such as “awesome” or “terrific” or a negative word such as “awful” or “terrible.