Category: Relationships

The best type of support to give your partner.

Giving more emotional support can improve relationships considerably.

Partners who receive more empathy, concern and acceptance  experienced more positive emotions and had higher relationship satisfaction.

Men, in particular, can improve their relationship by giving women more support of any type.

However, men have a tendency to give advice, when what women often prefer is emotional support, such as empathy.

Women can also improve their relationship by giving men more emotional support.

The conclusions come from a study of 114 newlywed couples.

All were asked about how much of two types of support they received from their partner:

• Emotional support: being empathetic, encouraging, trusting and caring.
• Informational support: providing solutions in the form of advice.

Overall, the results revealed that the best type of support to provide was emotional.

The study’s authors explain:

“…receiving more emotional support was associated with more favorable affect and higher relationship satisfaction regardless of support preferences.

Also, wives who received more informational support from their husbands had higher relationship satisfaction regardless of support preferences.”

However, not everyone likes the same type of support.

Some people get more out of empathy and concern, while others prefer straightforward advice.

Both too much or too little advice can be a source of irritation.

The study’s authors explain:

“Husbands who experienced underprovision of informational support from their wives, experienced less favorable affect.

In contrast, wives who experienced overprovision of informational support from their husbands experienced higher depressive symptoms.”

While there were differences in the types of support partners preferred, everyone was happy to get emotional support.

So, if you are not sure if your partner wants empathy or advice, the default should be empathy first.

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The study was published in the Journal of Family Psychology (Lorenzo et al., 2018).

People’s decisions about their relationships are often unselfish.

People sometimes stay in unhappy relationships when they believe their partner cannot cope with a breakup.

It helps show that people’s decisions about their relationships are often unselfish.

Even people who are not that committed to their relationship do not want to hurt the other person.

Dr Samantha Joel, the study’s first author, said:

“The more dependent people believed their partner was on the relationship, the less likely they were to initiate a breakup.”

One of the studies in the research followed 1,348 people over ten weeks.

Dr Joel explained the results:

“When people perceived that the partner was highly committed to the relationship they were less likely to initiate a break up.

This is true even for people who weren’t really committed to the relationship themselves or who were personally unsatisfied with the relationship.

Generally, we don’t want to hurt our partners and we care about what they want.”

Other reasons people stay in unsatisfying relationships include that there are no better alternatives available and they afraid of being alone.

It is difficult to say if staying with someone for their benefit is really the sensible thing to do.

It will depend on how the relationship pans out.

Dr Joel hints that some people may be overestimating their partner’s reliance on the relationship:

“One thing we don’t know is how accurate people’s perceptions are.

It could be the person is overestimating how committed the other partner is and how painful the break up would be.”

Ultimately, Dr Joel asks:

“Who wants a partner who doesn’t really want to be in the relationship?”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Joel et al., 2018).

The test can predict which friendships will thrive and which will crumble.

Knowing how a friend will react in an irritating situation is a simple test of a good friendship.

Although it is easy to quickly describe someone’s traits, it is harder to predict how they will react in specific situations.

Some people have almost no knowledge of how people close to them will react, while others are surprisingly accurate.

The study of 178 people had them think about a number of scenarios and then predict how irritated they would be and how irritated their friend would be.

For example, imagine your friend is talking to someone who is very sceptical.

Here is the authors’ explanation:

“When someone is overly skeptical of information that he/she receives.

When he/she questions things that are generally accepted. When he/she is very hard to convince of something.”

The results showed that people with better relationships knew which situations really set their friends off and which didn’t bother them.

The authors call these ‘if-then’ profiles.

Knowing a friend’s ‘if-then’ profile was linked to lower levels of relationship conflict and less frustration.

Ms Charity A. Friesen, the study’s first author, said:

“It’s a more detailed way of understanding personality.

You might know the person is extroverted when they’re out with their friends but more introverted when they’re in a new situation.”

The study tested all kinds of scenarios, including obliviousness, gullibility, social timidity, social boldness and perfectionism.

While people have a natural desire to understand other people’s personalities, it takes more effort to really get to know a person.

Ms Friesen said:

“But, if I’m close to someone, I can really start to learn the if-then profiles, and that’s what’s going to pay off in my relationship.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Friesen & Kammrath, 2011).

Infidelity may affect up to 75 percent of relationships.

Relying on intuition is a useful way to tell if a partner is cheating.

People are surprisingly good at telling if a person has cheated just from observing a small amount of their behaviour in a neutral situation.

In this study, a stranger was able to spot a relationship cheat just by watching a couple interacting for a few minutes.

Both the couple’s trustworthiness and commitment ‘leaked out’ from their behaviour.

People automatically pick up on the markers of infidelity without quite knowing how they have done it.

The study’s authors conclude that:

“…people may be internally programmed to identify inclinations that could be devastating to their relationship.

…individuals seeking a committed relationship may be well advised to listen to their intuition or at least think twice before committing to someone they suspect may be inclined to cheat.”

Detecting deception fast

For the study, established couples were given a quick drawing game to play that was recorded.

The couples also answered questions about their own infidelity.

Strangers watched the three- to five-minute video and tried to guess whether one had cheated on the other.

The results showed that people did surprisingly well given how little information they had to go on.

The study’s authors write:

“People can make remarkably accurate judgments about others in a variety of situations after just a brief exposure to their behavior.

Ambady and Rosenthal (1992) referred to this brief observation as a “thin slice.”

For example, students could accurately predict personality traits of an instructor after watching a 30-s video clip (Tom, Tong, & Hesse,2010), while Stillman, Maner, and Baumeister (2010) showed that a 2-s look at a picture of a face was enough to accurately determine a violent or nonviolent past.”

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The study was published in the journal Personal Relationships (Lambert et al., 2014).