The Science of a Happy Marriage
When your partner shows up home feeling really upset, how do you respond?
Have you ever eagerly anticipated telling your partner some fantastic news, only to feel a wave of annoyance and hurt when they hardly respond? While a partner's emotional support during difficult times might have the unfavorable consequence of making us feel obligated and more conscious of our unpleasant feelings, a partner's enthusiastic response to our good news can amplify the wonderful effects of that good fortune and strengthen our bond with them.
An uncommon brain-imaging study that was published in Human Brain Mapping has now added to this picture by demonstrating that the neural activity that long-married, elderly women exhibit in response to their husbands' positive emotional outbursts rather than their negative ones, is specifically linked to their relationship satisfaction.
The Rotman Research Institute in Toronto's psychologist Raluca Petrican and her coworkers from the University of Toronto enlisted 14 women, each of whom was 72 years old and had been married for an average duration of 40 years. While watching these carefully crafted videos, the researchers performed brain scans on these women.
The 10-second silent videos featured a stranger or the spouse of each woman exhibiting an emotion that did not correspond with the one-sentence description of the video clip displayed on the screen. For instance, the video was falsely labeled to imply that the husband was expressing this feeling while discussing a painful event (like the time he was fired), even if the video might actually show him laughing or smiling about a good memory (like the first property they bought). The opposite mismatch was shown in other videos, where a negative emotional expression was purportedly displayed while discussing a good memory.
In essence, the purpose of the videos was to give the impression that the women were witnessing a startling emotional response from their spouse or a stranger that differed from their own feelings. A scenario where a husband feels ecstatic about a topic that his wife does not "get" would be the real-world equivalent. The questions are whether the woman will notice and if she is more sensitive to that inconsistent emotion in her spouse than she might be in a stranger.
The first significant finding was that when the women watched videos of their husbands instead of videos of strangers, their brain activity was higher overall, indicating more emotional and mental neural processing. However, this was only the case when the videos featured displays of unexpectedly incongruent positive emotion. The women's brains were exactly as active overall when they watched a stranger as when they watched their husbands during the other kinds of videos. Stated differently, their whole-brain activity levels demonstrated a unique sensitivity to their husband's unexpectedly favorable feeling.
These are complex and preliminary findings that require careful interpretation. Furthermore, the study only looks at how wives react to their husbands' emotions. What about how husbands react to their wives' feelings and how crucial that is to both sides' marital happiness? These findings, however, are intriguing because they imply that, on a neurological level, individuals in committed, long-term relationships are particularly sensitive to their partners' pleasant emotions, especially when those emotions differ from their own.
This entire corpus of research raises interesting questions. When your significant other shows up home feeling really upset, how do you respond? Would you only notice if you were happy too?
