Johannesburg - Even as they walk down the aisle, newlyweds know on a subconscious level if their marriage will be unhappy.
Research, published on Friday in the journal Science, has found that although couples may not be completely aware of it, their subconscious responses are already providing clues to the future of their relationship.
The study’s primary author, Professor James McNulty, and his colleagues studied 135 heterosexual couples who had been married for less than six months and then followed up with them over a four-year period.
They found that the feelings people said they had when getting married were not related to how happy they would be, but it was in the gut-level negative evaluations of their partners that they unknowingly revealed their future happiness.
“Although they may be largely unwilling or unable to verbalise them, people’s automatic evaluations of their partners predict one of the most important outcomes of their lives – the trajectory of their marital satisfaction,” the researchers wrote.
In the experiment, the researchers asked people to choose a word to describe their relationship, how happy they were and how many problems their relationship had.
To test their subconscious or gut-level responses, the researchers flashed a photo of the person’s spouse 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 people had to press a key to say whether the word was positive or negative and the researchers measured their response time.
“It’s generally an easy task, but flashing a picture of their spouse makes people faster or slower depending on their automatic attitude toward the spouse,” McNulty said. “People who have really positive feelings about their partners are very quick to indicate that words like “awesome” are positive words and very slow to indicate words like “awful” are negative.”
That’s because our positive gut-level attitudes allow us to process positive conscious thoughts more quickly and negative ones more slowly when those automatic attitudes were activated.
“These gut-level responses are less influenced by what people want to think,” said McNulty.
“Everyone wants to be in a good marriage,” he said. “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.
“If they can sense that their gut is telling them that there is a problem, then they might benefit from exploring that, maybe even with a professional marriage counsellor.” - The Star, Daily Mail