Sometimes it’s easy to tell when a romantic relationship is about to take a dive. It doesn’t bode well if you would rather sort socks than go out on a date or if neither of you can think of much to say. Another bad sign is when—consciously or not—you associate your lover with words like “death” and “attacking.”

In a recent study using a word-association task, psychologists at the University of Rochester asked 222 men and women—all of them married, engaged or in committed relationships—to do some computerized word-sorting. As quickly as they could, participants paired their romantic partners’ names and distinctive characteristics with either positive words such as “peace” and “caring” or negative words such as “nagging” and “criticizing.”

The task is designed to tap into people’s “implicit” feelings—attitudes they may be unable or unwilling to explicitly acknowledge. Results showed that the more often individuals flubbed their responses to pairings of partner-related words with positive words, the more likely they were to have broken up a year later—even when variables such as relationship satisfaction and conflict were taken into ac­count. Across two experiments using slightly different kinds of words, participants who performed both below average on positive partner pairings and above average on negative partner pairings had a 70 to 75 percent likelihood of breaking up within a year, compared with only 11 to 14 percent of other participants.

These results suggest that implicit negative attitudes toward a romantic partner may reflect early misgivings and gripes that are either too subtle to con­sciously recognize or too distressing to admit­­­—but you can’t ignore your sub­conscious forever.

This article was originally published with the title Telltale Heart.

5 Comments

1. 1. zstansfi 02:05 PM 10/31/10

   More than 10% of these committed couples who did not show any implicitly negative attitudes towards their partners were broken up within a year? Clearly, either we are an extremely frivolous species or this sample is biased.

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2. 2. reflectogenesis 02:06 PM 10/31/10

   I like this sort of word association football match stick spray glue repellant insect. It is a positive result of the next thing in the sequence of halloween october bats witches spells voodoo. And you cant escape the truth lie honest danger death wish.

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3. 3. reflectogenesis 02:11 PM 10/31/10

   The partnership association is poor if the couple together are apart becoming separate.
   One might use this technique in marriage guidance if it was developed to detect more nuances in an individuals' character trait which could be adapted to coevolve with their partner. So to change the direction of the relationship sex marriage child.

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4. 4. sparcboy 04:13 PM 11/1/10

   Try these associations:
   First marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
   Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
   Third marriage is the triumph of stupidity over common sense.

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5. 5. geraldguild.com 06:03 PM 11/3/10

   @zstansfi mentions a biased sample. I've looked closely at the IAT (Implicit Associations Test) which is likely the method employed in this study and there is clearly a substantial amount of error within this measure, or any test the purports to measure "implicit" constructs. See http://bit.ly/dwXhNM for a closer look at the problems with such methods.

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