I’ve been reading into the Economics of Happiness a lot lately, and in my studies, I have discovered the Authentic Happiness project at nearby U Penn. This stuff is right up my alley.
One article that caught my eye was this discussion of Love and Positive events, which discusses the research of Shelly Gable, professor of psychology at UCLA. There’s a ton of cool papers I have to hunt down and read.
What differentiates Gable’s approach to marital psychology?
Most psychologists who research marriage work on conflict and incompatibility. Most marital therapists, in parallel, try to transform intolerable marriages into tolerable ones, or failing that try to mediate a harmonious divorce. A crucial issue in psychology-as-usual marriage research and therapy is how one member of a couple responds when the mate criticizes or how you both “cope” when something bad happens and things start to fall apart.
Shelly Gable turns all this on its head. She is one of the few who work on what makes a marriage great, and her work holds a crucial lesson for all of us who want to transform a good relationship—marriage, parent, or friendship—into an excellent one.
Capitalizing
She asks how do you respond when your mate tells you that she’s just been promoted, or your teenager tells you that the most beautiful girl in his class just accepted a date with him, or when your father tells you that he just made a hole-in-one, or when your best friend tells you that she just had an article accepted by the Psychological Review? Shelly divides the possible responses into the following four categories:
* Do you “react enthusiastically” (active-constructive)? “That’s the best news I’ve heard this week, and I’ll bet its just the first of many big raises you’ll get.”
* Do you “point out the potential problems or down sides of the good event” (active-destructive)? “Are you sure you can handle the added responsibility?”
* Do you “say little, but convey that you are happy to hear the news” (passive-constructive)? “That’s very nice, my dear.”
* Do you “seem uninterested” (passive-destructive)? “Isn’t all this rain something?”
From the Toronto Star:
Couples who lace their arguments with sarcasm and mean jabs, studies find, are usually headed for a split. But in their analysis of response styles, the researchers found it was the partners’ reactions to their loved ones’ victories, small and large, that most strongly predicted the strength of the relationships.
Four of the couples had broken up after two months, and the women in these pairs rated their partners’ usual response to good news as particularly uninspiring. Belittling a partner’s promotion, for example, can leave a deep and lasting chill, Gable says.
In most relationships, positive events outnumber negative ones by at least four to one, studies have found. “You get much more bang for your buck” by amplifying life’s rewards than by soothing its bruises, as important as that is, Gable says.
More:
The partners discussed positive and negative events that happened to them individually.
Later, each rated his or her partner’s responses to the news. Turns out, the responses to positive events were a better indicator of a relationship’s well-being than the responses to negative ones.
“If they felt their partner understood and cared for them, the extent they felt that was the indicator of their satisfaction,” said Shelly Gable, associate professor of psychology at UCLA and one of three researchers for the study.
Good to know.
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islandgrovepress 01.16.07 at 10:46 pm
Sounds strangely like Borat, studier of American events for Glorious Republic of Kazakhstan.
Tried to hit your Alberta Blogs for congrats and comment. Failed.
Almost hit Candace by accident.
Must be all that spam coming from the porn site I “accidentally” hit.
Thanks for remarks on my own blog.
Ivan
islandgrovepress 01.19.07 at 7:47 pm
I have found out through experience that most therapists work for separation, not reconciliation. It’s an easy cop-out for them.
Then you turn the client into a veg. Hee Hee.
Full of sweetness and light, I am!
Ivan