Friday, March 16, 2012

Study on what makes couples happy

Some new psych research has gotten a lot of publicity:
Men like to know when their wife or girlfriend is happy while women really want the man in their life to know when they are upset, according to a new study published by the American Psychological Association. ...

Relationship satisfaction was directly related to men’s ability to read their female partner’s positive emotions correctly. However, contrary to the researchers’ expectations, women who correctly understood that their partners were upset during the videotaped incident were much more likely to be satisfied with their relationship than if they correctly understood that their partner was happy. Also, when men understood that their female partner was angry or upset, the women reported being happier, though the men were not. The authors suggest that being empathetic to a partner’s negative emotions may feel threatening to the relationship for men but not for women.
Here is the full paper (pdf).

The psychologists seem to be over-analyzing with the empathy conclusions. All the study found was that men liked hearing that their wives were happy, and wives liked hearing their husbands say that they were upset about something. Maybe the women are just drama queens who feed on personal drama. Just look at soap operas and Lifetime movies that are so popular with women. The husbands tire of the nagging and bitching, and are just happy to hear their wives being happy about something.

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