NEW STUDY SHOWS NO EXPERTS NECESSARY TO
RECOGNIZE TROUBLED MARRIAGES

Professor of Psychology Marc Schulz

It doesn’t take an expert in clinical psychology to recognize the signs of a troubled marriage, says a study co-authored by Bryn Mawr College Associate Professor of Psychology Marc Schulz and Robert Waldinger, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Just by watching couples interact, untrained college students were able to identify troubled romantic relationships and predict with more than 80 percent accuracy which couples would still be together after five years, the researchers found.

The study, published in the Journal of Family Psychology, found that college students, using their innate abilities to recognize emotion, were highly accurate in identifying troubled romantic relationships, said Schulz.

Six undergraduates were asked to watch videotapes of couples' interactions and note the spouses' emotional states such as anger, fear, happiness and sadness as they discussed relationship issues. When the judgments of the six individual observers were pooled, researchers found that they predicted with 85 percent accuracy which couples would still be together after five years.

"We aimed to see whether people could use their intuitive judgments to identify what couples were expressing emotionally and whether these judgments could predict relationship health," said Waldinger.

"These judgments were highly predictive of relationship health and longevity. Investigators have typically attempted to make research on this topic more objective by using a complex list of rules and directions for identifying specific behaviors in intimate relationships. In contrast, we relied on people's natural abilities to recognize a variety of emotions."

At a time when nearly half of all marriages in the United States end in divorce, this study could prove useful in helping couples recognize that how they deal with disagreements can help determine the stability of their relationships, said Schulz, associate professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College and co-principal investigator.

"How women and men express their emotions can affect the quality and stability of their marriages," said Schulz. "In distressed marriages, men were more likely to display hostile emotions and an absence of empathy while women were more likely to express sadness and other vulnerable feelings along with an absence of empathy."

Identifying troubled relationships is a vital step in providing resources to help couples improve their marriages, said Schulz. "The costs of divorce and the costs of poor marriages are high not just for the adults involved but also for the children."

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