Happy couples unconsciously share this linguistic habit. Are you doing it?
Couples are more likely to match their language when their relationship is going well, research finds.
Using the same patterns of words or turns of phrase suggests a couple are in sync.
The reason is something psychologists call ‘language style matching’.
Professor James Pennebaker, who led the study, explained:
“When two people start a conversation, they usually begin talking alike within a matter of seconds.
This also happens when people read a book or watch a movie.
As soon as the credits roll, they find themselves talking like the author or the central characters.”
The study’s authors tracked the changes in the language of poets and writers over the years and how it reflected their relationship.
For example, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung wrote to each other weekly for around 7 years.
Their relationship was tempestuous and this is reflected at the very basic level of language use, well below the meaning of words.
The study tracked the use of common words, including pronouns, prepositions and articles like “I”, “into”, and “the”.
Because the words are so common, it is easier to track changes in style.
When their relationship was solid, their use of these words was more similar.
Towards the end, when Freud and Jung had fallen out, their styles no longer matched.
Dr Molly Ireland, the study’s first author, said:
“Because style matching is automatic, it serves as an unobtrusive window into people’s close relationships with others.”
The researchers saw the same pattern emerge in the poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, whose relationship was rocky, to say the least.
The language both used in their poems changed over the years to reflect the state of their relationship, the researchers found.
Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning showed the same changes in their poetry as their relationship changed over time.
Dr Ireland said:
“Style words in the spouses’ poems were more similar during happier periods of their relationships and less synchronized toward each relationship’s end.”
The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Ireland et al., 2010).
