Category: Relationships

Poor parenting still resonating with people now in their 60s as much as the death of a loved one.

Children of parents who are warmer and less controlling grow up happier, a new study finds.

In contrast, parents who are overly controlling tend to bring up children with worse mental well-being.

Dr Mai Stafford, one of the study’s authors, said:

“We found that people whose parents showed warmth and responsiveness had higher life satisfaction and better mental wellbeing throughout early, middle and late adulthood.”

The study tracked 5,362 people from their birth in 1946.

Over sixty years later, 2,000 of them completed a series of follow-up surveys including one asking about how controlling their parents were.

Controlling parents did not allow their children to make their own decisions and fostered too much dependence on them.

Controlling parents also invaded their children’s privacy and didn’t allow them to have their own opinions.

The negative effect of controlling parents was still felt by people in their 60s.

The researchers likened the damaging effect to the death of a loved one.

The other problematic factor — lack of parental warmth — makes it difficult to have a strong bond with parents.

A strong emotional attachment to parents provides a better base from which children can explore the world.

The study was published in The Journal of Positive Psychology (Stafford et al., 2015).

Parent image from Shutterstock

People feel emotionally close to others displaying this type of smile.

A ‘Duchenne smile’ is a powerful way of striking up a new relationship, a new study finds.

People are highly tuned to the Duchenne smile, which involves upturned lips and crinkly eyes.

And they can easily spot a fake smile, which tends to involve only the mouth and not the eyes.

The research tested how much people are aware of each other’s emotions, whether negative or positive.

It found that people were more aware of positive emotions in other people than negative.

It also found that a genuine smile was a strong sign of cooperation and affiliation.

People felt emotionally closer to strangers who showed positive emotions.

The positive emotion that was particularly attractive was awe.

Dr Belinda Campos, who led the research, said:

“Our findings provide new evidence of the significance of positive emotions in social settings and highlight the role that positive emotions display in the development of new social connections.

People are highly attuned to the positive emotions of others and can be more attuned to others’ positive emotions than negative emotions.”

The study was published in the journal Motivation and Emotion (Campos et al., 2015).

→ Read on: 10 Hidden Benefits of Smiling

Image credit: greekadman

Digit ratio signals how much men will listen attentively, be complimentary and compromise.

Men whose ring fingers are longer than their index fingers — a low digit ratio — are, on average, nicer towards women.

The new research suggests this may also explain why men with a bigger difference in length between the two fingers also tend to have more children.

In general, men’s ring fingers are longer than their index fingers.

For women, there’s usually less difference between index and ring finger.

This difference is caused by hormone exposure in the womb.

The study, which is published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, had 155 men and women record their social interactions over almost three weeks (Moskowitz et al., 2015).

Each time they spoke to someone for more than five minutes, afterwards they checked off a list of behaviours they performed.

These behaviours indicated how quarrelsome or how agreeable they were being during each interaction.

The results showed that men with longer ring fingers in comparison to their index fingers were around 30% more agreeable — but only when interacting with women.

No difference was seen for women and for men talking to other men.

Professor Debbie Moskowitz, the study’s first author, said:

“When with women, men with smaller ratios were more likely to listen attentively, smile and laugh, compromise or compliment the other person.”

Professor Simon Young, another of the study’s authors said:

“It is fascinating to see that moderate variations of hormones before birth can actually influence adult behaviour in a selective way.”

The results may explain why, as previous studies have shown, men with longer ring fingers in comparison to their index fingers tend to have more children.

Professor Moskowitz said:

“Our research suggests they have more harmonious relationships with women; these behaviors support the formation and maintenance of relationships with women.

This might explain why they have more children on average.”

Measure your digit ratio

Here’s how to measure your digit ratio.

It’s the length of your index finger (2D) divided by the length of your ring finger (4D) as shown below.

The average digit ratio for men is 0.947 and for women it is 0.965.

Man’s hands image from Shutterstock

The effects of a stressful early childhood on critical biological processes.

Having a stressful childhood has been linked in a new study to genetic changes which may cause accelerated aging.

The study, published online in the journal Biological Psychiatry, found connections between both childhood adversity and psychiatric disorders and critical changes at the cellular level (Tyrka et al., 2015).

Professor Audrey Tyrka, who led the study, said:

“We are interested in these relationships because there is now clear evidence that stress exposure and psychiatric conditions are associated with inflammation and health conditions like diabetes and heart disease.

Identifying the changes that occur at a cellular level due to these psychosocial factors allows us to understand the causes of these poor health conditions and possibly the overall aging process.”

For the research, 290 adults were asked whether they had lost parents as children or been maltreated in any way.

They were also assessed for mental health problems, including depression, anxiety and addictions.

The results showed that both mental health problems and childhood adversity were associated with shortening of telomeres — caps on each strand of DNA which affect how the cells age.

Shorter telomeres have been repeatedly linked to accelerated aging.

The study also found a link between childhood adversity and/or mental health problems and changes in mitochondrial DNA.

These changes in mitochondrial DNA may be involved in mental health problems, although little is known about the connection at present.

Professor Tyrka continued:

“Understanding this biology is necessary to move toward better treatment and prevention options for stress-related psychiatric and medical conditions, and may shed light on the aging process itself.”

Image credit: Neil Palmer

This parental behaviour in the first three years is vital to a child’s future success.

Sensitive caregiving in the first three years of life can predict academic achievement and social competence all the way into adulthood, a new study finds.

Parents who are sensitive caregivers tend to respond to their child’s signals promptly and appropriately.

Sensitive parents are also positively involved in interactions with the child and provide a secure base for them to explore the world.

Dr. Lee Raby, who led the study, said:

“The study indicates that the quality of children’s early caregiving experiences has an enduring and ongoing role in promoting successful social and academic development into the years of maturity.”

The conclusions, published in the journal Child Development, come from a study of 243 people born into poverty from a range of backgrounds (Raby et al., 2014).

Their progress was followed from birth to age 32 as part of the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation.

Parents were observed interacting with their children during the first three years of the infants’ lives.

Later on, children completed standardised tests and their social adaptation was reported on by their teachers.

The researchers continued to follow the children, even into their twenties and thirties, asking them about their adult relationships and academic attainment.

The results showed that even into their thirties, those early caregiving experiences continued to be linked to their eventual academic attainment.

Social functioning was less strongly linked to early caregiving experiences with the effect tailing off into participants’ thirties.

Dr Raby said:

“Altogether, the study suggests that children’s experiences with parents during the first few years of life have a unique role in promoting social and academic functioning–not merely during the first two decades of life, but also during adulthood.

This suggests that investments in early parent-child relationships may result in long-term returns that accumulate across individuals’ lives.

Because individuals’ success in relationships and academics represents the foundation for a healthy society, programs and initiatives that equip parents to interact with their children in a sensitive manner during the first few years of their children’s life can have long-term benefits for individuals, families, and society at large.”

Image credit: Stephan Hochhaus

A new three-year study finds that divorce rates were more than halved by watching movies about relationships and discussing them afterwards.

Researchers compared a ‘movie-and-talk’ condition against groups following other, more intensive forms of couples therapy, and were surprised at the results (Rogge et al., 2013).

The study’s lead author, Ronald Rogge, said:

“We thought the movie treatment would help, but not nearly as much as the other programs in which we were teaching all of these state-of-the-art skills.”

He continued:

“The results suggest that husbands and wives have a pretty good sense of what they might be doing right and wrong in their relationships. Thus, you might not need to teach them a whole lot of skills to cut the divorce rate. You might just need to get them to think about how they are currently behaving. And for five movies to give us a benefit over three years–that is awesome.”

The benefits of this type of activity are that a marriage counsellor is not required–couples spend most of their time watching movies about relationships and talking about them afterwards.

The study compared three different marriage interventions against a control group:

1. Conflict management: focuses on teaching couples active listening skills and how to slow down the pace of arguments.
2. Compassion and acceptance: couples learn to appreciate their relationships more and to use language which communicates acceptance.
3. Movie-and-talk: couples watched and discussed movies about relationships after receiving a 10-minute lecture on how watching couples in movies could help them pay attention to their own behaviour.

When the groups were compared over three years, all did equally well compared with a control group, in which couples divorced at twice the rate.

This was a surprise for the movie-and-talk group given that it’s not much like ‘going into therapy’.

Rogge continued:

“You might not be able to get your husband into a couples group, especially when you are happy. But watching a movie together and having a discussion, that’s not so scary. It’s less pathologizing, less stigmatizing.”

Here is Ronald Rogge talking more about the study, including clips from some of the films that were used:

Image credit: Sam Javanrouh

Are two mothers better than one?

Children who are raised by same-sex parents do just as well in social development, education and emotionally as those raised by heterosexual couples, an Australian review of the research finds.

In Australia 11% of gay men and 33% of lesbians have children–figures which will likely increase as barriers are reduced.

The review of the research was conduced by Deb Dempsey and commissioned by the Australian Institute of Family Studies (Dempsey, 2014).

The research certainly does not support the view that children brought up by same-sex parents are harmed as a result.

Two mothers

Quite the contrary, children brought up by lesbians may benefit from having two mothers–often reporting better relationships with their children and displaying higher levels of involvement.

The reason for this could be…

“…due to the “double dose” of “feminine” parenting. Just as heterosexual mothers usually have greater care-giving responsibilities and display greater parenting skill than heterosexual fathers, lesbian mothers appear to bring this gendered tendency to their parenting relationships.” (Dempsey, 2014).

While the review was broadly positive, some worries were expressed: children of same-sex parents are more likely to report concerns about bullying or other abuse based on the sexuality of their parents.

Set against this, the review finds that while there is fear of this type of bullying or abuse, it is not often actually experienced.

Equitable but not identical

Same-sex couples are also more likely to set an equitable example for their children. They are more likely to share the housework and to avoid privileging work over home-life.

While some studies have found negative effects on children of having same-sex parents (e.g. Regnerus, 2012), these have not taken into account the higher rates of separation amongst same-sex couples.

Experts no longer try to claim that outcomes of same-sex parenting are identical to heterosexual couples– along with some potential advantages comes the social stigma and higher rates of separation.

Nevertheless, a report from the American Academy of Pediatrics points out:

“Over the past decade, 11 countries have recognized marriage equality and, thus, allow marriage between 2 partners of the same gender: Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, and Sweden. There has been no evidence that children in these countries have experienced difficulties as a result of these social changes.” (Perrin et al., 2013)

Image credit: Caitlin Childs