Category: Relationships

Psychologist challenges the orthodox view with evidence from studies conducted over 30 years.

Single people are more likely to experience psychological growth and development than those who are married, a psychologist claims.

This is just one perk of being single which is often ignored.

Others include greater sociability and resilience.

The conclusions come from surveying 814 studies conducted over 30 years.

Dr Bella DePaulo, addressing the American Psychological Association’s 124th Annual Convention, said:

“The preoccupation with the perils of loneliness can obscure the profound benefits of solitude.

It is time for a more accurate portrayal of single people and single life — one that recognizes the real strengths and resilience of people who are single, and what makes their lives so meaningful.”

While the advantages of being married are well-known, if over-stated, Dr DePaulo wants the perks of singledom to be acknowledged and understood.

Dr DePaulo finds several advantages to being single, after reviewing the research:

• Single people are more connected to their friends, family, neighbours and co-workers.
• Single people derive more meaning from their work than married people.
• Single people have greater self-determination.

It is the greater self-determination, along with other factors, that may contribute towards single people being more likely to experience a feeling of growth and development as a person.

In addition, single people who feel self-sufficient are less likely to experience negative emotions.

These advantages are seen despite the many benefits that society grants to married people, Dr DePaulo pointed out:

“People who marry get access to more than 1,000 federal benefits and protections, many of them financial.

Considering all of the financial and cultural advantages people get just because they are married, it becomes even more striking that single people are doing as well as they are.”

Being married, of course, has its advantages as well and Dr DePaulo does not claim one status is better than the other:

“More than ever before, Americans can pursue the ways of living that work best for them.

There is no one blueprint for the good life.

What matters is not what everyone else is doing or what other people think we should be doing, but whether we can find the places, the spaces and the people that fit who we really are and allow us to live our best lives.”

The study was presented at the American Psychological Association’s 124th Annual Convention by Dr Bella DePaulo.

A promising new way to maintain healthy relationships.

Focusing on the future can help couples deal with relationship conflicts, new research finds.

When people imagined how they would feel in one year’s time, they thought and felt better about their relationships.

Mr Alex Huynh, the lead author of the study, said:

“When romantic partners argue over things like finances, jealousy, or other interpersonal issues, they tend to employ their current feelings as fuel for a heated argument.

By envisioning their relationship in the future, people can shift the focus away from their current feelings and mitigate conflicts.”

For the study, people thought back to a recent conflict with a friend or romantic partner.

One group thought about how they felt in the moment.

Another group imagined how they would feel one year in the future.

Both groups then wrote about their relationships.

An analysis of the text showed that thinking about the future had positive effects:

• People wrote more positive about their relationships.
• They used more words related to forgiveness and understanding.

The study shows the importance of how people respond to conflict in a relationship.

Mr Huynh said:

“Our study demonstrates that adopting a future-oriented perspective in the context of a relationship conflict — reflecting on how one might feel a year from now — may be a valuable coping tool for one’s psychological happiness and relationship well-being.”

The trick of giving yourself a little psychological distance has all sorts of other benefits.

It can help you generate self-insight, gain emotional control, improve self-control and even trigger wise thoughts.

For more on this, read: Psychological Distance: 10 Fascinating Effects of a Simple Mind Hack

The study was published in Social Psychological and Personality Science (Huynh et al., 2016).

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How to keep the spark alive in long-term relationships.

Responsiveness is the key to keeping the sexual spark alive in long-term relationships, new research finds.

A deep level of understanding and the willingness to invest resources is central to responsiveness.

A responsive partner shows understanding to their other half, rather than dismissing their problems or ignoring them.

It is about being aware and responding to the emotional needs of the other person.

Professor Gurit Birnbaum, the first author of this study, said:

“Our research shows that partners who are responsive to each other outside the bedroom are able to maintain their sexual desire.

Responsiveness — which is a type of intimacy — is so important in a relationship because it signals that one is really concerned with the welfare of the other, but in a way that is truly open and informed about what the other cares about and wants.”

For the research 100 heterosexual couples kept diaries over six weeks.

They reported their own sexual desire and the responsiveness of their partner outside the bedroom.

The results showed that both men and women felt more sexual desire when their partner was more responsive to their nonsexual needs.

Women in particular responded to higher levels of responsiveness in their partner with greater levels of sexual desire.

The study’s authors explain:

“People who perceive that their partners understand and appreciate their needs can view sexual interactions as one way to enhance intimate experiences with responsive partners and, accordingly, may experience greater desire for sex with them.”

Professor Birnbaum said:

“Being nice’ and things like that are not necessarily based on who the partner is and what the partner really wants.

When a mate is truly responsive, the relationship feels special and unique and he or she is perceived as valued and desirable.

Sexual desire thrives on increasing intimacy and being responsive is one of the best ways to instill this elusive sensation over time; better than any pyrotechnic sex.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Birnbaum et al., 2016).

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Certain emotional behaviours are linked to physical health problems, study finds.

How people react to marital disagreements has a strong relationship with their health.

Dealing with relationship conflict by getting angry predicts blood pressure problems, new research finds.

Stonewalling — that is, shutting down emotionally — is linked to stiff muscles and a bad back.

Professor Robert Levenson, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Our findings reveal a new level of precision in how emotions are linked to health, and how our behaviors over time can predict the development of negative health outcomes.”

Dr Claudia Haase, the study’s first author, said:

“We looked at marital-conflict conversations that lasted just 15 minutes and could predict the development of health problems over 20 years for husbands based on the emotional behaviors that they showed during these 15 minutes.”

The results — which come from 20 years of data — might encourage some people to consider anger management, the researchers think.

Dr Claudia Haase said:

“Conflict happens in every marriage, but people deal with it in different ways.

Some of us explode with anger; some of us shut down.

Our study shows that these different emotional behaviors can predict the development of different health problems in the long run.”

The study has followed 156 middle-aged couples since 1989.

The couples, who are all from San Francisco, are heterosexual and have been together for many years.

Every year they undergo a battery of tests, including being videotaped interacting in the lab.

They found that displays of anger and stonewalling were linked to high blood pressure and back problems respectively.

Professor Levenson said:

“For years, we’ve known that negative emotions are associated with negative health outcomes, but this study dug deeper to find that specific emotions are linked to specific health problems.

This is one of the many ways that our emotions provide a window for glimpsing important qualities of our future lives.”

The study was published in the journal Emotion (Haase et al., 2016).

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How feeling wealthy affects men and women’s satisfaction with their relationships.

When men feel wealthy, they are less satisfied with their partner’s appearance, new research finds.

Essentially, when men are wealthier, they feel their value is higher.

For women, though, how much money they have doesn’t seem to matter to how satisfied they are with their relationship.

Similarly, women do not feel that being richer increases how attractive they are.

Money, however, makes both sexes more bold.

When they feel richer, people are more likely to approach others that they find attractive.

Professor Darius Chan, one of the study’s authors, said:

“…wealthy men attach more importance to a mate’s physical attractiveness setting higher standards and preferring to engage in short-term mating than those who have less money.

However, for committed women, money may lead to less variation in their mating strategies because losing a long-term relationship generally has a higher reproductive cost.”

The results come from a Chinese study of heterosexuals involved in long-term relationships.

Here is how the study’s authors explain the results:

“…individuals’ mate preferences could be conditional on their self-perceived mate value…

Men’s mate value is based more on resources than women’s mate value, while women’s mate value depends more on physical attractiveness than men’s mate value.”

Professor Chan explained the motivation for the study:

“We wanted a better understanding of the psychological importance of money in the development of romantic relationships because very little is known about this subject.

That way people would have a better perspective of the relationships they are in.”

Would the same results be seen outside China?

Professor Chan thinks they would:

“Whereas it remains as an empirical question to be answered, we expect that our findings are likely to be found in other cultures as well because the basic mechanisms of mate selection have been found to be rather similar across culture.”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology (Li et al., 2016).

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The ‘corticolimbic system’ plays an important role in mood disorders, such as depression.

The brain system governing the emotional response is most heritable from mother to daughter, but less so from mother to son, a new study finds.

Fathers, though, are less likely to pass on their emotional brain circuitry to either boys or girls.

The ‘corticolimbic system’ plays an important role in mood disorders, such as depression.

The corticolimbic system is made up of the amydala, hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

The research could explain why depression is strongly heritable from mother to daughter.

Not that this means mothers are solely responsible for any depression which daughters develop, Dr Fumiko Hoeft explained:

“Many factors play a role in depression — genes that are not inherited from the mother, social environment, and life experiences, to name only three.

Mother-daughter transmission is just one piece of it.

But this is the first study to bridge animal and human clinical research and show a possible matrilineal transmission of human corticolimbic circuitry, which has been implicated in depression, by scanning both parents and offspring.

It opens the door to a whole new avenue of research looking at intergenerational transmission patterns in the human brain.”

The conclusions come from a series of brain scans conducted on 35 families.

The researchers found that the volume of grey matter was more similar in certain areas related to the emotions in mothers and daughters.

Other family relationships did not show the same strong connection.

Dr Hoeft continued:

“This gives us a potential new tool to better understand depression and other neuropsychiatric conditions, as most conditions seem to show intergenerational transmission patterns.

Anxiety, autism, addition, schizophrenia, dyslexia, you name it — brain patterns inherited from both mothers and fathers have an impact on just about all of them.”

The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience (Yamagata et al., 2016).

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Study found reduced risk of cancer, stroke and heart disease.

More social ties at a younger age are linked to better physical well-being latter on, a new study finds.

The physical benefits include a lower risk of many long-term health problems including stroke, heart disease and cancer.

The study comes on top of earlier findings that older adults also live longer if they have more social connections.

Professor Kathleen Mullan Harris, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Based on these findings, it should be as important to encourage adolescents and young adults to build broad social relationships and social skills for interacting with others as it is to eat healthy and be physically active.”

For adolescents, the researchers found, larger social networks protected against inflammation and obesity.

For older adults, being socially isolated was worse for health than either hypertension or diabetes.

Professor Harris said:

“The relationship between health and the degree to which people are integrated in large social networks is strongest at the beginning and at the end of life, and not so important in middle adulthood, when the quality, not the quantity, of social relationships matters.”

The study drew from four nationally representative surveys in the US.

Social relationships were taken into account along with key markers of physical health like waist circumference, body mass index and blood pressure.

Professor Yang Claire Yang, the study’s first author, said:

“We studied the interplay between social relationships, behavioral factors and physiological dysregulation that, over time, lead to chronic diseases of aging — cancer being a prominent example.

Our analysis makes it clear that doctors, clinicians, and other health workers should redouble their efforts to help the public understand how important strong social bonds are throughout the course of all of our lives.”

The study was published in the journal PNAS (Yang et al., 2015).

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Almost everyone wants to get married eventually — but the reasons have changed.

Marriage is now more about children than an institution based on gender specialisation, a new study concludes.

Intensive investment in children is now the drive behind modern marriage, rather than economic necessity.

Professor Shelly Lundberg, a demographer and one of the study’s authors, said:

“In a gender-specialized economy, where men and women are playing very different productive roles, you need the long-term commitment to protect the vulnerable party, who in this case is the woman.

But when women’s educational attainment increased and surpassed that of men, and women became more committed to jobs and careers, the kind of economic disparity that supported a division of labor in the household eroded.”

But marriage means different things to different parts of society, Professor Lundberg explained:

“What we see is a striking adherence to traditional marriage patterns among the college educated and those with higher professional degrees.

While marriage rates have declined consistently over time, they have declined far more among people whose education level is high school or some college.”

More educated and higher income mothers also spend more time with their children than they did 30 years ago:

“In terms of time and money, the well-educated, higher-income parents have increased their investments in children much more than those with lower incomes.

They have the know-how and the resources and they expect to help their children become economically successful in a way that may seem out of reach for parents with much lower levels of resources.”

Despite all these changes, most men and women still do marry eventually:

“If you look at the fraction of people 50 years old who have ever married, the differences between the education groups are very, very small.

What is really distinctive is the timing of marriage and the very high proportion of women with a high school diploma or some college who have their first child either on their own or within a cohabitating relationship, which is extremely rare among people with a college degree or higher.

The timing is extraordinarily suggestive.

Almost everyone wants to get married eventually.

The question is when, and do you wait until you get married before you have a child?”

The study was published in the journal The Future of Children (Lundberg & Pollak, 2015).

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There’s a relationship advantage for men who do the chores.

Men who take on their fair share of chores around the house tend to have a better sex life, new research shows.

Men who contribute to the housework, psychologists have found, have more sex and it is more satisfying.

The data from German couples directly contradicts the results of a 2012 US study, which found the opposite.

But the earlier study didn’t ring true to Professor Matt Johnson, one of the new study’s authors.

Professor Johnson, who was previously a couple’s therapists, said:

“In any relationship, the amount of housework is going to mean something different based on the couple’s context, based on their own expectations for what each partner should be doing, and their comparison levels of what happens with other couples they know.”

Data from 1,338 German couples showed that when men perceived they did their fair share, the couple had more sex and it was more satisfying.

But could there be a fundamental difference between US and German couples?

Professor Johnson said:

“There are cultural differences but if the logic held from the prior studies, we would have expected to have a more pronounced negative impact of housework on sexuality in Germany because it’s a bit more traditional.

But that wasn’t the case at all.”

Of course, we can’t tell that doing a fair share of housework causes better sex from this research, but the link is fascinating and certainly questions the earlier, widely reported study.

Professor Johnson said:

“Rather than avoiding chores in the hopes of having more sex, as prior research would imply, men are likely to experience more frequent and satisfying passion for both partners between the sheets when they simply do their fair share.”

The study was published in the Journal of Family Psychology (Johnson et al., 2015).

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