Category: Relationships

Certain types of anxiety can cause massive ups and downs in relationships.

Partners who have attachment issues can cause considerable instability in their relationship.

One type, known as ‘attachment anxiety’ by psychologists, involves see-sawing feelings.

It is the same reason that babies cry when they are taken from their mothers.

Around one in five people has an anxious attachment style.

A classic sign is having wildly varying feelings about the relationship from one day to the next.

People experiencing attachment anxiety spend a lot of time thinking about what the other person wants.

They can easily move from feeling strongly attached to wanting independence.

Ms Ashley Cooper, the study’s first author, said:

“For people anxious in their attachments, they have anxiety as to whether the person is going to be there for them and whether they are worthy of others.

I was interested in how attachment security impacted partners’ experiences in their relationship on a daily basis.

Some couples experience instability from one day to the next in their relationship, so we sought out to explore what could increase or decrease this volatility.”

The second problematic type is attachment avoidance: this describes someone who wants to avoid getting too attached to the other person.

Around one in four people has an avoidant attachment style.

High levels of attachment anxiety are linked to more ups and downs in the relationship, while avoidance is linked to low relationship satisfaction.

The study of 157 couples — half of whom had been dating for two years or less — found that high attachment avoidance in one partner was linked to low relationship satisfaction for both.

Ms Cooper said:

“For the average person, stay attuned to what your partner is saying and avoid making assumptions that can escalate conflict.

Trusting in your partner and your relationship is important to daily interactions and stability for your relationship.”

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The study was published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (Cooper et al., 2017).

Men and women use different methods to deal with negative emotions in long-term relationships.

Men and women in long-term relationships deal with difficulties in different ways.

Men do not like to express negative emotions and tend to feel frustrated when trying to give or receive emotional support.

However, studies show that giving more emotional support can improve relationships, as can listening from the heart.

Women, though, feel more sadness and worry and prefer to express those negative emotions.

Unlike men, women prefer to talk through issues and offer support.

Women also feel better if they can give and receive support, unlike men, who only seem to feel frustration.

Professor Deborah Carr, the study’s first author, said:

“The men don’t really want to talk about it or spend too much time thinking about it.

Men often don’t want to express vulnerable emotions, while women are much more comfortable expressing sadness or worry.”

The conclusions come from a study of 722 couples who had been married for an average of 39 years.

They were asked about their marital experience and how their spouse reacted to and affected them.

The results showed that giving and receiving support tended to make women feel better, but not men.

Naturally, men also reported receiving more emotional support from their wives.

However, women tended to feel more strain in their relationships.

Professor Carr said:

“For women, getting a lot of support from their spouse is a positive experience.

Older men, however, may feel frustrated receiving lots of support from their wife, especially if it makes them feel helpless or less competent.”

Sadness, worry and frustration are the negative emotions most frequently reported by long-term couples.

Professor Carr said:

“Men who provide high levels of support to their wives may feel this frustration if they believe that they would rather be focusing their energies on another activity.”

The results of this study may be partly down to the older generation involved.

Younger couples may have different patterns.

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The study was published in the The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences (Carr et al., 2016).

The study found a reduced risk of cancer, stroke and heart disease.

More social ties at a younger age are linked to better physical well-being later on.

The physical benefits include a lower risk of many long-term health problems, including stroke, heart disease and cancer.

The study comes on top of earlier findings that older adults also live longer if they have more social connections.

Professor Kathleen Mullan Harris, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Based on these findings, it should be as important to encourage adolescents and young adults to build broad social relationships and social skills for interacting with others as it is to eat healthy and be physically active.”

For adolescents, the researchers found, larger social networks protected against inflammation and obesity.

For older adults, being socially isolated was worse for health than either hypertension or diabetes.

Professor Harris said:

“The relationship between health and the degree to which people are integrated in large social networks is strongest at the beginning and at the end of life, and not so important in middle adulthood, when the quality, not the quantity, of social relationships matters.”

The study drew from four nationally representative surveys in the US.

Social relationships were taken into account along with key markers of physical health like waist circumference, body mass index and blood pressure.

Professor Yang Claire Yang, the study’s first author, said:

“We studied the interplay between social relationships, behavioral factors and physiological dysregulation that, over time, lead to chronic diseases of aging — cancer being a prominent example.

Our analysis makes it clear that doctors, clinicians, and other health workers should redouble their efforts to help the public understand how important strong social bonds are throughout the course of all of our lives.”

The study was published in the journal PNAS (Yang et al., 2015).

This personality type is more confident in dealing with the inevitable conflicts that marriage throws up.

Extraverts have happier marriages: they tend to have fewer marital problems as newlyweds and are more satisfied with their marriages over time.

The reason may be that extraverts are more confident in dealing with the inevitable conflicts that marriage throws up.

In contrast, shy people tended to have the most problems in their marriage.

Shy people reported more issues with jealousy, money, household management and trust.

Shy people likely find it more difficult to enter relationships so they feel more anxiety about their partner.

The conclusions come from a study of 112 couples who were asked about their shyness and marital satisfaction.

Some of the couples were tracked over six months to see if shyness predicted changes in marital satisfaction.

While shyness was linked to worse relationships, shy people can adjust, the study’s authors write:

“There is hope even though shyness itself might be resistant to change.

People can be taught to have more efficacy in how to resolve the specific marital problems they face.

As a consequence, any marital difficulties prompted by personality can be prevented by explicit training on dealing with marital problems.”

A note on shyness

The study asked people about ‘shyness’, which is linked with introversion, but not the same.

The words shy and introverted are often used interchangeably.

Although there is certainly an overlap, shyness is fear and anxiety about social interactions whereas an introvert may be ambivalent towards them.

So, non-shy people are not necessarily extraverts — although they are likely to be.

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The study was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Baker & McNulty, 2010).

How much do you appreciate your partner?

Simply being appreciative of your partner’s good points, however modest, improves the relationship.

People who recognised their partner’s efforts to be more patient and loving have a happier and more secure relationship, psychologists have discovered.

On the other hand, those who believed their partner could not change have worse relationships, even if their partner is making a real effort to do better.

The trick is to convince yourself that change is possible and to appreciate any steps in the right direction, however small.

Dr Daniel C. Molden, a study co-author, said:

“A secret to building a happy relationship is to embrace the idea that your partner can change, to give him or her credit for making these types of efforts and to resist blaming him or her for not trying hard enough all of the time.”

The conclusions come from a study in which couples rated how much their partner was trying to improve the relationship.

Did they, for example, make an effort to be a better listener or try and show more understanding?

After three months they rated their relationships again.

The results showed that people who appreciated their partner’s efforts to change were happier with their relationship.

Even sincere efforts to improve the relationship are wasted, the study found, if they are not appreciated.

Dr Molden said:

“If you don’t believe that your partner is capable of changing his or her fundamental characteristics, even when he or she is working hard to try to improve your relationship, you can actually end up discounting these efforts.”

It is common for people in relationships to be sceptical about their partner’s efforts, however hard they are trying.

Don’t let that happen to you, said Dr Chin Ming Hui, the study’s first author:

“Many of us tend to under appreciate our partner’s efforts to improve the relationship, simply because we do not have enough faith in those attempts.

When we see those efforts in a positive light, we can enjoy our relationship much more.”

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The study was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Hui et al., 2011).

Hugs reduce negative emotions that day and the following one.

A simple hug is one of the easiest ways to reduce the stress caused by arguments.

People who received a hug on a day when they had an argument felt less bad about it, psychologists have found.

The research included 404 people who were asked about their daily conflicts and whether they had received any hugs.

The results showed that receiving a hug when a person had an argument helped reduce negative emotions that day and the following one.

The authors write:

“Receiving a hug on the day of conflict was associated with improved concurrent negative and positive affect and improved next day negative affect compared to days when conflict occurred but no hug was received.”

Dr Michael Murphy, the study’s first author, said:

“This research is in its early stages.

We still have questions about when, how, and for whom hugs are most helpful.

However, our study suggests that consensual hugs might be useful for showing support to somebody enduring relationship conflict.”

Other studies have shown the considerable benefits of interpersonal touch, including that with a romantic partner:

“…individuals assigned to various interpersonal touch manipulations with romantic partners report less distress and show reduced cardiovascular reactivity, cortisol secretion, and activation of brain regions associated with emotional and behavioral threat  compared to those who did not engage in interpersonal touch with their partners.”

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The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Murphy et al., 2018).

The trait is linked higher relationship satisfaction in both partners.

People who enjoy making others laugh at them have happier relationships.

Not minding being the ‘butt of the joke’ mainly has positive effects on relationships.

However, people who don’t like to be laughed at tend to be less happy in their relationship.

It is down to the fact that people have different styles of humour.

For example, some people enjoy ridiculing others, but don’t like to be laughed at themselves.

Some like being the centre of humorous attention, others less so.

Professor René Proyer, who led the study, said:

“These […] are personality traits that can occur at the same time, to varying degrees and in different combinations.

They can range, for example, from making harmless jokes to ridiculing others.

All of these characteristics are normal, up to a certain point — including being afraid of being laughed at.”

The study included 154 couples who separately answered questions about their relationship and their sense of humour.

The results showed that couples whose sense of humour was similar were happier.

They also found that making other people laugh at you primarily has positive effects.

Dr Kay Brauer, study co-author, said:

“Women reported more often that they tended to be satisfied with their relationship and felt more attracted to their partner.

They and their partners also tended to be equally satisfied with their sex life.”

Being afraid of being laughed at, though, generally had negative effects on relationships.

It led to mistrust and lower relationship satisfaction.

Those who primarily preferred to laugh at others were no more or less happy in their relationship, although these couples tended to have more arguments.

Dr Brauer said:

“That is hardly surprising, considering that these people often go too far and make derisive comments which can then lead to an argument.”

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The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Brauer & Proyer, 2018).