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The Skill of Learning to Read Your SpouseA new excerpt from Dr. John Gottman's latest book covering: Observational research, emotional communication and the NASA task.
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Understanding how to ready our spouse's emotion is a skill that can be learned.
“ Emotional communication seemed like the key toward understanding relationships. Mostly, it appeared to be men who had shut down.”
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The following is an excerpt from "Principia Amoris: The New Science of Love" available from Routledge publishing, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business.
There is a joke about a husband who is a computer programmer. His wife asks him to go to the store and buy a loaf of bread. She says: "Please go the grocery store and buy a loaf of bread, and, if they have eggs, get six."
The husband returns with six loaves of bread. The wife asks why he bought six loaves of bread. He says, "Because they had eggs."
The lesson in this joke is that both expressing and reading, or "de-coding," information needs to include the nonverbal as well as the verbal content of the message. The most important nonverbal content is about emotional communication. How can emotional communication be studied in a laboratory?
With my former student, Alan Porterfield, I studied this process of transmitting nonverbal emotional information in a study. We created a large number of sentences that could have one of three different meanings, depending on how they were expressed nonverbally. For example, take the sentence, "Are you going to do the dishes?" We suggested three meanings:
"I have been doing all the dishes at every meal for the past six weeks. I’m sick of it. It’s your turn to do the dishes;" or
"I’m just wondering if you’re going to do the dishes tonight, or if I am going to do the dishes. I’m just looking for information;" or
"Oh, I am so pleasantly surprised! It looks like you are going to do the dishes tonight. How sweet. I am pleased!"
We randomly checked one of these meanings that we wanted communicated, and asked the speaker to try to convey that meaning while saying only that sentence—"Are you going to do the dishes?"
The subjects in the study were either happily or unhappily married couples. Using videotape, we could ask the spouse to try to guess which of the three meanings their partner was intending to send. Using the same videotape we could also ask other people (not the partner) to also try to decode the meaning.
With this experiment, there were lots of possibilities for discriminating happy from unhappy couples. For example, maybe the husbands (or the wives) in unhappy couples were just bad at reading all nonverbal messages sent, compared to husbands in happy couples. In this outcome, maybe the unhappy husbands were just lousy at decoding nonverbal messages; then they would have lacked a receiving (decoding) communication skill. Or, perhaps they were bad at accurately sending nonverbal meaning (i.e., no one could read the unhappily married husbands); then they would have lacked a sending (coding) communication skill. Or, it could have been that no skill was involved at all.
Maybe people would be bad just at sending messages accurately only to their spouse, or at receiving messages accurately from only their spouse. That wouldn’t be a skill deficit at all. It would just mean that one or both people in a relationship were shut down, but only to their partner.
As you can see, this experiment could test a lot of possible hypotheses about sending and receiving emotional meanings. We love experiments like that one, which can decide between different theories.
It turned out that only unhappily married husbands (not wives) were bad at reading only their own partner’s emotional communications, not the emotional communications of other men’s wives. What a surprising and interesting result! It was not a general deficit at all. These unhappy guys were just shut down at reading their wives. They were quite able to read emotional communication in other women.
What was amazing is that two weeks after Alan Porterfield and I submitted an article to a journal for publication, I received a journal article to review from an Australian researcher named Pat Noller. Pat had dreamed up almost an identical study and conducted it with Australian couples in Queensland. And she got exactly the same results we did! The results replicated with wildly different samples, across countries. Both studies were eventually published.
It was a privilege to get to know Pat Noller. She is a remarkable woman, a real success story. At the age of 60, after raising five children, married to a pastor, she decided that she wanted to attend college. Her family supported her, and she finished in three years and then went on to get a doctoral degree. She became a professor at the University of Queensland, and her doctoral thesis became a major book in the field. Pat went on to do great things in helping us understand relationships. I love telling her story.
The NASA Task
In the beginning of observational research on couples, scientists investigated cognitive problem solving. It didn’t seem like the problem was really so much a skill deficit as it was a state that existed just in the relationship that had shut people down from reading and connecting with one another. After our initial research effort, we quickly turned toward emotion. Emotional communication seemed like the key toward understanding relationships. Mostly, it appeared to be men who had shut down.
At the start of my research on couples, I was curious if unhappy couples had a skill deficit in problem solving, or perhaps a skill deficit in working together as a team. So, in my lab I had couples work on a standard decision-making task that social psychologists had created, called the NASA task. In that task each individual ranked the survival value of 15 items for a rendezvous on the moon with the mother-ship, items like "oxygen," "rope," and so on. The NASA astronauts had also agreed to do the rating, so it was possible to get a correct score from each person. Then they discussed the problem together and arrived at a consensus ranking of the 15 items.
In the NASA task it was possible to see if the group score was better than each person’s individual score, and better than the best individual score. That provided us with an objective score of group functioning and teamwork. We could also determine whether group performance on the task discriminated between happy and unhappy couples. Here we could examine if unhappily married couples had a deficit in problem-solving ability, or a deficit in teamwork.
First of all, behavior on the NASA task did not discriminate! Unhappily married couples were generally okay on this task, really no worse than happily married couples. Therefore, amazingly, unhappily married couples have overall skill deficits in problem-solving, nor in working together as a team, so long as the task was a task like the NASA task, without personal emotional significance. This finding was so important because therapy at that time was oriented toward helping couples with problem solving. This study showed that the early focus in therapy on problem solving was totally misguided.
Yet, zoom forward to the part of the study in which they discussed their own issues with the study. Now, clear differences emerged between happily and unhappily married couples. Everyone was much more emotional on the personal conflict discussion than on the NASA task. No big surprise there. Now, the differences very clearly appeared between happily and unhappily married couples during personal conflict, in the emotions expressed, and in people’s responses to their partner’s emotions.
Put emotion into the brew of couples' interaction, and all that skill in decision-making and teamwork fell apart. Something about conflict discriminated happily from unhappily married people. Now we knew that the deficits of unhappily married couples had something to do with emotions.
The other reason this research became so important to us is that it also helped reveal a very fundamental process; that of a couple’s friendship.
Robert Levenson and I had found that couples' responsiveness just to their partner’s story of their day was predictive of harsh or gentle startup in the subsequent conflict discussion. That clued us in to the fact that a couple’s "friendship" (whatever that meant) must be considered in understanding how they dealt with conflict. Thomas Bradbury had discovered a similar fact when he examined how newlywed couples provided support to one another on a task in which each person talked about how they wanted to change personally, independent of the relationship. Bradbury coded how supportive a partner was in this conversation.
He found that just support was important in predicting the fate of newlywed marriages, and, furthermore, it was predictively important over and above the functional or dysfunctional nature of conflict interactions. That finding highlighted the importance of positive affect during non-conflict interaction. Searching for that kind of positive interaction is why we seek close relationships in the first place.
A lot of attunement is about being emotionally available and responsive emotionally to one’s partner. In the Love Lab, Jani Driver and I zoomed in and coded what we called "bids" for connection. These were small requests people made to get immediate needs met. For example, one newlywed wife stood looking out the apartment lab window and said, "So beautiful out there. There’s a pretty boat." That is a "bid" she is making for her husband’s attention. One of the cameras would then focus on the husband, who, in this case, was eating a bowl of cereal and watching TV. Guess what? He showed absolutely no response, which Jani coded as "turning away" from the bid for attention by his new bride. Turning toward would have been any response on his part, even looking out the window and saying, "Huh!" That was "good enough" for turning toward. If he’d been irritable, as in saying, "Don’t interrupt me, I’m watching TV," that response would have been coded as "turning against."
Because all the couples ate dinner together, Jani coded bids and turning for just 10 minutes of dinnertime conversations. Later, it turned out that the newlyweds who eventually divorced had turned toward bids during dinner 33% of the time, on average, whereas the couples who stayed married had turned toward bids during dinner 86% of the time. That’s really a huge difference, almost like a switch that is either on or off, in terms of its potential impact on the marriage.
Turning toward bids is about responding to one’s partner’s immediate need, for attention, for interest, for humor, for excitement, for silliness, for conversation, for emotional support, for empathy. As I already mentioned, Tom Bradbury’s lab at UCLA studied newlyweds’ conversations in which he assessed the extent to which people provided emotional support. The topic was, "How do you want to change in the future, just for personal reasons?" For example, one partner might want to get in better physical shape, while the other wanted to take up a new musical instrument. Bradbury found that turning toward one’s partner’s thoughts, emotions, and plans in that supportive conversation was also highly predictive of marital stability, above and beyond expressing contempt and other negativity during a conflict discussion. I think that you can sometimes actually see people crumple physically when their partner has turned away from their bid for connection. Being turning away is what Sue Johnson calls "attachment injuries." The small times of turning away still hurt.
Jani Driver and I discovered that this process of turning toward bids was strongly related to the expression of positive emotions (especially affection and shared humor) during conflict. Later, in an intervention study, we got some initial evidence that the relationship was causal. How does one create more humor and affection during conflict? The answer turned out to be: Get people to turn toward their partner’s bids. Move them from the 33% group to the 86% group. Then the husbands become more humorous and the wives become more receptive to their husbands’ attempts at shared humor.
John Mordechai Gottman, PhD, is a scholar and researcher renowned for his work on marital stability and divorce prediction. He has conducted 40 years of research with thousands of couples and is the co-founder, with his wife, Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman, of the Gottman Institute. He is also the executive director of the affiliated Relationship Research Institute and a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington, where he founded "The Love Lab." More information about John and the Gottman Institute is available at www.gottman.com.
There is a joke about a husband who is a computer programmer. His wife asks him to go to the store and buy a loaf of bread. She says: "Please go the grocery store and buy a loaf of bread, and, if they have eggs, get six."
The husband returns with six loaves of bread. The wife asks why he bought six loaves of bread. He says, "Because they had eggs."
The lesson in this joke is that both expressing and reading, or "de-coding," information needs to include the nonverbal as well as the verbal content of the message. The most important nonverbal content is about emotional communication. How can emotional communication be studied in a laboratory?
With my former student, Alan Porterfield, I studied this process of transmitting nonverbal emotional information in a study. We created a large number of sentences that could have one of three different meanings, depending on how they were expressed nonverbally. For example, take the sentence, "Are you going to do the dishes?" We suggested three meanings:
"I have been doing all the dishes at every meal for the past six weeks. I’m sick of it. It’s your turn to do the dishes;" or
"I’m just wondering if you’re going to do the dishes tonight, or if I am going to do the dishes. I’m just looking for information;" or
"Oh, I am so pleasantly surprised! It looks like you are going to do the dishes tonight. How sweet. I am pleased!"
We randomly checked one of these meanings that we wanted communicated, and asked the speaker to try to convey that meaning while saying only that sentence—"Are you going to do the dishes?"
The subjects in the study were either happily or unhappily married couples. Using videotape, we could ask the spouse to try to guess which of the three meanings their partner was intending to send. Using the same videotape we could also ask other people (not the partner) to also try to decode the meaning.
With this experiment, there were lots of possibilities for discriminating happy from unhappy couples. For example, maybe the husbands (or the wives) in unhappy couples were just bad at reading all nonverbal messages sent, compared to husbands in happy couples. In this outcome, maybe the unhappy husbands were just lousy at decoding nonverbal messages; then they would have lacked a receiving (decoding) communication skill. Or, perhaps they were bad at accurately sending nonverbal meaning (i.e., no one could read the unhappily married husbands); then they would have lacked a sending (coding) communication skill. Or, it could have been that no skill was involved at all.
Maybe people would be bad just at sending messages accurately only to their spouse, or at receiving messages accurately from only their spouse. That wouldn’t be a skill deficit at all. It would just mean that one or both people in a relationship were shut down, but only to their partner.
As you can see, this experiment could test a lot of possible hypotheses about sending and receiving emotional meanings. We love experiments like that one, which can decide between different theories.
It turned out that only unhappily married husbands (not wives) were bad at reading only their own partner’s emotional communications, not the emotional communications of other men’s wives. What a surprising and interesting result! It was not a general deficit at all. These unhappy guys were just shut down at reading their wives. They were quite able to read emotional communication in other women.
What was amazing is that two weeks after Alan Porterfield and I submitted an article to a journal for publication, I received a journal article to review from an Australian researcher named Pat Noller. Pat had dreamed up almost an identical study and conducted it with Australian couples in Queensland. And she got exactly the same results we did! The results replicated with wildly different samples, across countries. Both studies were eventually published.
It was a privilege to get to know Pat Noller. She is a remarkable woman, a real success story. At the age of 60, after raising five children, married to a pastor, she decided that she wanted to attend college. Her family supported her, and she finished in three years and then went on to get a doctoral degree. She became a professor at the University of Queensland, and her doctoral thesis became a major book in the field. Pat went on to do great things in helping us understand relationships. I love telling her story.
The NASA Task
In the beginning of observational research on couples, scientists investigated cognitive problem solving. It didn’t seem like the problem was really so much a skill deficit as it was a state that existed just in the relationship that had shut people down from reading and connecting with one another. After our initial research effort, we quickly turned toward emotion. Emotional communication seemed like the key toward understanding relationships. Mostly, it appeared to be men who had shut down.
At the start of my research on couples, I was curious if unhappy couples had a skill deficit in problem solving, or perhaps a skill deficit in working together as a team. So, in my lab I had couples work on a standard decision-making task that social psychologists had created, called the NASA task. In that task each individual ranked the survival value of 15 items for a rendezvous on the moon with the mother-ship, items like "oxygen," "rope," and so on. The NASA astronauts had also agreed to do the rating, so it was possible to get a correct score from each person. Then they discussed the problem together and arrived at a consensus ranking of the 15 items.
In the NASA task it was possible to see if the group score was better than each person’s individual score, and better than the best individual score. That provided us with an objective score of group functioning and teamwork. We could also determine whether group performance on the task discriminated between happy and unhappy couples. Here we could examine if unhappily married couples had a deficit in problem-solving ability, or a deficit in teamwork.
First of all, behavior on the NASA task did not discriminate! Unhappily married couples were generally okay on this task, really no worse than happily married couples. Therefore, amazingly, unhappily married couples
Yet, zoom forward to the part of the study in which they discussed their own issues with the study. Now, clear differences emerged between happily and unhappily married couples. Everyone was much more emotional on the personal conflict discussion than on the NASA task. No big surprise there. Now, the differences very clearly appeared between happily and unhappily married couples during personal conflict, in the emotions expressed, and in people’s responses to their partner’s emotions.
Put emotion into the brew of couples' interaction, and all that skill in decision-making and teamwork fell apart. Something about conflict discriminated happily from unhappily married people. Now we knew that the deficits of unhappily married couples had something to do with emotions.
The other reason this research became so important to us is that it also helped reveal a very fundamental process; that of a couple’s friendship.
Robert Levenson and I had found that couples' responsiveness just to their partner’s story of their day was predictive of harsh or gentle startup in the subsequent conflict discussion. That clued us in to the fact that a couple’s "friendship" (whatever that meant) must be considered in understanding how they dealt with conflict. Thomas Bradbury had discovered a similar fact when he examined how newlywed couples provided support to one another on a task in which each person talked about how they wanted to change personally, independent of the relationship. Bradbury coded how supportive a partner was in this conversation.
He found that just support was important in predicting the fate of newlywed marriages, and, furthermore, it was predictively important over and above the functional or dysfunctional nature of conflict interactions. That finding highlighted the importance of positive affect during non-conflict interaction. Searching for that kind of positive interaction is why we seek close relationships in the first place.
A lot of attunement is about being emotionally available and responsive emotionally to one’s partner. In the Love Lab, Jani Driver and I zoomed in and coded what we called "bids" for connection. These were small requests people made to get immediate needs met. For example, one newlywed wife stood looking out the apartment lab window and said, "So beautiful out there. There’s a pretty boat." That is a "bid" she is making for her husband’s attention. One of the cameras would then focus on the husband, who, in this case, was eating a bowl of cereal and watching TV. Guess what? He showed absolutely no response, which Jani coded as "turning away" from the bid for attention by his new bride. Turning toward would have been any response on his part, even looking out the window and saying, "Huh!" That was "good enough" for turning toward. If he’d been irritable, as in saying, "Don’t interrupt me, I’m watching TV," that response would have been coded as "turning against."
Because all the couples ate dinner together, Jani coded bids and turning for just 10 minutes of dinnertime conversations. Later, it turned out that the newlyweds who eventually divorced had turned toward bids during dinner 33% of the time, on average, whereas the couples who stayed married had turned toward bids during dinner 86% of the time. That’s really a huge difference, almost like a switch that is either on or off, in terms of its potential impact on the marriage.
Turning toward bids is about responding to one’s partner’s immediate need, for attention, for interest, for humor, for excitement, for silliness, for conversation, for emotional support, for empathy. As I already mentioned, Tom Bradbury’s lab at UCLA studied newlyweds’ conversations in which he assessed the extent to which people provided emotional support. The topic was, "How do you want to change in the future, just for personal reasons?" For example, one partner might want to get in better physical shape, while the other wanted to take up a new musical instrument. Bradbury found that turning toward one’s partner’s thoughts, emotions, and plans in that supportive conversation was also highly predictive of marital stability, above and beyond expressing contempt and other negativity during a conflict discussion. I think that you can sometimes actually see people crumple physically when their partner has turned away from their bid for connection. Being turning away is what Sue Johnson calls "attachment injuries." The small times of turning away still hurt.
Jani Driver and I discovered that this process of turning toward bids was strongly related to the expression of positive emotions (especially affection and shared humor) during conflict. Later, in an intervention study, we got some initial evidence that the relationship was causal. How does one create more humor and affection during conflict? The answer turned out to be: Get people to turn toward their partner’s bids. Move them from the 33% group to the 86% group. Then the husbands become more humorous and the wives become more receptive to their husbands’ attempts at shared humor.
John Mordechai Gottman, PhD, is a scholar and researcher renowned for his work on marital stability and divorce prediction. He has conducted 40 years of research with thousands of couples and is the co-founder, with his wife, Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman, of the Gottman Institute. He is also the executive director of the affiliated Relationship Research Institute and a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington, where he founded "The Love Lab." More information about John and the Gottman Institute is available at www.gottman.com.
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