Category: Relationships

“Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.” —George Bernard Shaw

People are usually at their worst after a bad night’s sleep, but what does that do to their intimate relationships?

A new study finds that even one bad night’s sleep can be surprisingly damaging to a relationship (Gordon & Chen, 2013).

In the research, 78 couples were tracked over a two-week period. Each day the couples made notes about their sleep quality and any arguments they’d had with their partners.

The results showed that even for those who were good sleepers, just a single night’s poor sleep was associated with increased relationship conflict the next day.

These findings were not affected by one partner being the source of the poor sleep, or overall relationship satisfaction, depression, stress or anxiety.

Only one partner in the couple had to have a bad night’s sleep and their relationship suffered the next day. Four processes caused by the poor sleep are to blame:

1. Less empathy. The worse couples slept, the less empathy they showed towards their partners. And it worked both ways: after a bad night’s sleep, not only did they find it difficult to judge their partner’s emotions, it was difficult for their partner to read them in turn.
2. More negativity. There will always be bad feelings at some stage in a relationship; but to be a good relationship overall, these should be massively outweighed by the good feelings. When partners slept poorly, this ratio went in the wrong direction towards more negative feelings.
3. Conflict resolution problems. When tired, couples found it harder to resolve their differences.
4. Selfishness. Poor sleep can induce more selfish feelings in partners and they feel less able to appreciate and feel gratitude towards the other.

Since poor sleep can also damage your health, as well as your relationship, it’s vital to address these issues as soon as possible.

The good news is that improving sleep can improve the relationship. In fact, it works both ways. One study has found that better sleep encourages better relationships and that the improved relationship status feeds back into improved sleep (Hasler et al., 2010).

So, starting to sleep better can put your relationship into a virtuous circle that continues to reap the benefits.

Image credit: Sheldon Wood

For over 40 years the psychologist Professor John Gottman has been analysing relationships, both good and bad.

He’s followed couples across decades in many psychological studies to see what kinds of behaviours predict whether they would stay together in the long-term or were soon destined for the divorce courts.

Amongst the factors he identified, four have stood out, time and time again. When Gottman sees a couple’s communication overrun with these, the chances are they will divorce in an average of around six years from their marriage.

1. Criticism

Of course we all complain to each other—married couples more than most—but it’s a particular type of corrosive criticism that Gottman identified as being so destructive.

This is when one criticises the other’s core being, their personality. For example: “You’re late because you don’t care about me“.

We all make mistakes, but notice that here it’s all about how those mistakes are interpreted. At their worst, criticisms have the implication that the other person is bad or wrong at some deeper level.

Repeated criticisms that strike at the heart of the other person’s being signal the end of the relationship will be sooner rather than later.

Alternatively: voice the concern and make a request, e.g. “I’m bored, let’s have a game of cards.” (NOT: “You’re ignoring me you selfish @#$%!”)

2. Contempt

When someone has contempt for their partner, Gottman found that this was the single greatest predictor of divorce.

Contempt can involve sarcasm, name-calling, mimicking and eye-rolling. Whatever form it takes, contempt makes the other person feel worthless.

(Contempt is also bad for your health, as Gottman found that couples who were contemptuous of each other suffered from more infectious diseases like colds and flu.)

Alternatively: build respect by appreciating the positive, e.g. “Love your taste in music!” (NOT “The sound of your laughter makes me want to vomit.”)

3. Defensiveness

A person is too defensive when they are always trying to make excuses for their failures or slip-ups. People do this automatically from time-to-time, but when it becomes a persistent theme in a relationship, this can signal the end.

It’s an even worse signal when partners are also trying to score points off the other on top of being defensive. After all, people who live together are supposed to be in partnership, supporting each other. Life is difficult enough without being attacked from within as well as from without.

Alternatively: take your share of the blame and suggest a solution, e.g. “I guess I should have put it on my list, OK let’s do it now.” (NOT: No, I didn’t pay the gas bill because you forgot to remind me.”)

4. Stonewalling

Stonewalling is when a person metaphorically raises the drawbridge and cuts off communication. There are no nods of encouragement to their partner when they speak, no attempt to empathise and no effort to respond or connect. It’s like talking to a brick wall.

Stonewalling can often be a result of a prolonged period of criticism, contempt and defensiveness. It may feel like the only response to a worsening situation, but lack of communication will not solve the problems at the heart of the relationship.

Alternatively: speak, move, respond, blink, move a muscle, anything! (NOT: here’s my impression of a brick wall.)

Image credit: liquidnight

…and people who are single think being single is the only way to live for a civilised, modern individual?

People easily become evangelists for their own way of life. Some apparently think that because they have made a particular life choice, everyone else should do the same.

Why is it so difficult to accept that different choices suit different people?

That’s the question that fascinated Laurin et al. (2013), who set about testing an explanation.

They wondered if it was a result of feeling that your own situation is relatively unchangeable. Say you feel that you’ll never meet anyone and you’ll be single forever, or that you’ll be stuck in a marriage forever with no hope of release.

They wondered if the mind battles this apparent inevitability by rationalising and idealising the current situation, whatever it is.

Idealising a situation makes it more likely you’ll see it as best for everyone, rather than the something that happens to be right for your particular circumstances.

Across four studies, the researchers found exactly this pattern. When people thought their relationship status was unchangeable they were more likely to idealise it. They were also more likely to like others whose status was the same as theirs:

“The knowledge that others live their lives differently than oneself can threaten the rationality of one’s own life choices, and the idealization of one’s own status provides a simple rationalization in the face of these ever-present potential threats. This idealization implies that others are worse off because of their different life arrangements and that “the way I am is the way everyone ought to be.”” (Laurin et al., 2013)

 Image credit: linh ngan

Have you ever said a word over and over again until it lost its meaning? It’s a trick many discover in childhood which can provide the first inkling that words aren’t the solid, dependable, unchanging labels they seem.

Instead words start to feel slippery, open to interpretation and (whisper it) interchangeable.

Anyway, it’s a fun game: if you like, try it again now: say your own name over and over again out loud until it loses all meaning.

This is an effect that psychologists have been studying, on and off, for at least a hundred years. The hope is that if words can come to have no meaning through repetition then perhaps negative ideas and thoughts can be tackled in the same way.

Nowadays repeating words over and over again is part of a therapeutic technique called cognitive defusion. The theory goes that if you have negative habitual thoughts going around in your head all the time, then perhaps their power can be defused through repetition.

Some psychologists see it as particularly useful in the treatment of depression. That’s because one of the cognitive components of depression is negative automatic thoughts. These are things like repeatedly thinking to yourself: “I am worthless,” or “I am an idiot.”

People experiencing depressive episodes often find that these types of thoughts go around in their heads endlessly.

In theory, then, it may be possible to tackle automatic negative thoughts by trying to defuse their meaning (remember, suppression doesn’t work and has all sorts of weird consequences).

What therapists do is extract the essence of the thought, for example “idiot”, and get the patient to repeat it over and over again.

What you’ll be asking, as did I when I came across it: is there evidence that it can work? And if you’ve been reading PsyBlog for a while, you’ll know I wouldn’t mention it unless there was!

In a recent study Masuda et al. (2010) recruited 147 participants, only a few of whom had mental health problems. Each person identified a negative thought about themselves and boiled it down to one word like ‘idiot’, ‘fat’ or ‘angry’. Then each person rated how uncomfortable that word made them feel and how much they believed it referred to them.

The participants were split into five groups. In one of them they repeated the word over and over again as fast as they could for 30 seconds, before rating the associated discomfort and believability again.

The results showed that in comparison to other techniques including distraction, a control condition and a weaker defusion condition, it was the full cognitive defusion that worked best. Participants in this condition experienced the largest decreases in the thought’s believability and associated discomfort. Even those who had confirmed depressive symptoms found the exercise useful.

Like repeating your name over-and-over again, the effect does wear off. In the long-term it is better to try and change the content of these thoughts, or at least your relationship with them.

Still, there is some new evidence emerging that cognitive defusion can be useful in the longer-term (Deacon et al., 2011).

But in the meantime, sometimes we need to reduce the impact of a thought for a while and even a short respite can help us think more clearly in the moment. When next you need to do that, try it, see what happens.

→ Continue reading: 8 Ways to Get Rid of Unwanted Negative Thoughts

Image credit: Wasfi Akab

It’s often said that if you find yourself thinking about your ex-partner, it’s probably a sign of a problem in your current relationship. Psychological research has now backed this up:

“A longitudinal study followed individuals in relationships at three points over the course of 6 months. Participants reported their current relationship quality, emotional attachment to ex-partners, and perceived quality of relationship alternatives.” (Spielmann et al., 2012)

What they found was that…

“…increased longing for ex-partners predicted declines in relationship quality, but only when focused on one’s most recent ex-partner. This is because longing for more recent ex-partners is associated with perceptions of relationship alternatives, while longing for more distant ex-partners is not.”

So the more dissatisfied you are with your current partner, the more likely you are to think about your most recent ex-partner. Not only that but…

“…ex-partners may serve as desirable relationship alternatives, with romantic feelings for recent exes interfering with current relationship quality.”

Recent exes are seen as particularly attractive alternatives to current relationships because they are assumed to be more accessible and available. And contrary to the romantic view of love, partners are relatively interchangeable:

“The belonging substitution hypothesis suggests that close connections with others are relatively substitutable for one another, such that the loss of one connection can be tempered with another.” (Baumeister & Leary, 1995)

This is why many people go back to their most recent ex-partner when they get fed up with their current partner. It’s often the quickest and easiest way of fulfilling the strong need to belong.

Image credit: Luis Pedro

Here’s an easy choice: would you rather spend 4 minutes chatting to a good friend or to a complete stranger?

It’s safe to say most of us would choose our friend. When you chat to someone you know well it’s comfortable, relaxed and familiar—with a friend we know what we’re getting. With a stranger, though, anything could happen.

The problem with strangers is that we have to make more of an effort: psychologists call it ‘impression management’. With friends we can ‘be ourselves’, which means letting it all hang out; but with strangers we control our behaviour more tightly and our impression management goes into overdrive.

It’s this effort and stress of controlling ourselves with strangers that puts us off. But according to recent research there are hidden benefits to this effort and a lesson for all of us about how we (should) treat those we know well.

Get your swagger on

In their research Dunn et al. (2007) had participants in long-term relationships predict how pleasurable it would be to interact with:

1. Their partner.
2. An opposite sex stranger.

They then had a quick chat and rated how good they felt afterwards. What they found was that people enjoyed talking to their romantic partner less than they predicted. On the other hand they had more fun talking to a stranger than they had predicted.

So what’s going on here? How can people be having more fun than they imagine talking to complete strangers and less with the person they are in a long-term relationship with?

What the researchers found was that it comes down to whether or not you’re making an effort. Sometimes when we talk to our friends and partners we don’t make much of an effort to entertain them, show off or to present ourselves in the best light. But we do tend to make more of an effort with strangers.

In a follow-up study the researchers told participants to make an effort with their partners and then their enjoyment of the social interaction improved in line with their predictions. This suggests we can all have more fun with our partners and friends if we make an effort.

There’s a fascinating point that comes out of this research. When we predict how fun talking to a stranger will be, we fail to factor in the extra effort we make. But when we think about our partners we fail to factor in how lazy we tend to be.

There are two morals to this story: the sad but unsurprising fact that we take our partners and friends for granted and the less intuitive idea that strangers are more fun than we imagine because showing off makes us feel good.

Image credit: Robin Geschonneck (1, 2, 3, 4 & 5) & Traveller_40

Imagine I put you in a Big Brother-type house for a week with a random selection of people. Not the narcissists they choose for those shows but people from every walk of life, a real random cross-section.

Everyone mixes with each other, then afterwards everyone reports how much they like each other. On average, would people like each other more or less after the week?

For a long time psychologists have assumed that familiarity breeds liking. If you look it up in a psychology textbook, you’ll find the answer is pretty clear. The more people are exposed to each other, the more liking they report.

The assumption is that if you hang around with people for long enough, you’ll eventually get some respect for them and discover some common interests, even if they’re not your type.

A couple of years ago a study by Michael Norton and colleagues challenged this orthodoxy, finding instead that familiarity breeds contempt. You can click through for my in-depth description but the essential point was that the more people were exposed to facts about strangers, the more they came to find dissimilarities and these led to less liking.

The explanation was that we naturally assume that other people are similar to us. Unless there’s some major reason to think otherwise, we assume they have similar views, habits and tastes to ourselves. So, when we find out the truth—that they like opera, or soap opera or are very conservative or very liberal—we tend to like them less.

Controversial theory

As often happens in psychology, this sort of finding is like a red rag to bull. Challenge the orthodoxy and someone is going to try and take you down.

Those someones are Reis et al. (2011) in a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They claim that when people interact there are all sorts of things going on between them that Norton et al.’s study didn’t take into account. For example I may find you, unlike me, don’t enjoy cricket, but we discover a mutual passion for photography. In social interactions we’re likely to work together to find these sorts of mutual interests.

The big selling-point of Reis’ studies is that people are involved in live interactions rather than Norton’s study which only allowed people to view the other person’s preferences. Reis et al. found that the more people interacted face-to-face, the more they liked each other. (As always in psychology studies, these results are on average—some people may have begun to hate each other with a passion but overall the effect was positive.)

The rebels are fighting back though. Norton et al. argue that Reis et al. are using loaded dice. The two types of interaction they used were (unintentionally) more likely to encourage people to like each other. One of them is even called the ‘Relationship Closeness Induction Task’. Perhaps we’d all like each other more if we were forced to undergo the Relationship Closeness Induction Task with everyone we met. Quite naturally Reis et al. reply by saying: yes, our paradigm is flawed but it’s better than yours (you’ll appreciate that this is some seriously crude paraphrasing!).

Motivation rules

I will leave the experts to fight over the details but what we often find with psychological phenomena is that they depend on situations. In fact both studies illuminate different aspects of human nature. When motivated we often do go out of our way to find things to like in other people we come into close contact with. We learn to accommodate because our civilisation requires that, by and large, we work together.

On the other hand when there’s nothing riding on it, we notice our dissimilarities with others and this leads to less liking. So, whether familiarity leads to liking or contempt crucially depends on our motivation.

All that aside, Norton’s finding that familiarity can breed contempt—although it may not be a universal truth—still provides a healthy rejoinder to the standard psych textbook approach that mere exposure leads to liking.

Think about it: when I take you out of that Big Brother house, are you really sure you’ll like those people more, on average, or will it be the last you hope to see of them?

Image credit: Robyn Lee

Here’s a deceptively simple question: if we all have the potential to be creative, why is it so hard?

Part of the problem is that so little attention is paid to the psychological research on creativity. If we can harness what scientists already know about creativity, we can propel ourselves to new heights of achievement.

Creativity isn’t just for artists, we all need it—at home, in our relationships and, for many of us, at work. By one measure around 30% of workers in the US are members of the creative classes. Along with designers, writers and artists this includes professions like lawyers, business people and healthcare professionals; in fact it includes anyone who has to use an existing body of knowledge to reach creative solutions.

For many of us, then, our incomes rely on our creativity. Boost our creativity and the rewards will come.

Collected below are recent PsyBlog articles which explore how to be creative:

• Boost Creativity: 7 Unusual Psychological Techniques
• The Creative Power of Thinking Outside Yourself
• Get Creative: 7 More Psychological Techniques
• Unusual Thinking Styles Increase Creativity
• 6 Ways to Kill Creativity
• Creativity for the Cautious
• How to Promote Visionary Thinking
• Why People Secretly Fear Creative Ideas
• Duck/Rabbit Illusion Provides a Simple Test of Creativity
• The Dark Side of Creativity
• What’s the Best Time of Day to be Creative?
• Five Effortless Postures that Foster Creative Thinking
• Why You Should Seek Out Unusual or Downright Weird Experiences
• The Incubation Effect: How to Break Through a Mental Block
• The Brainstorming Tweak: How to Boost Creativity in Groups
• How to Create Brand New Solutions From Old Objects and Ideas

Image credit: Faith Goble