The measure isn’t the high tech detector of romantic emotions that you might expect. Instead, it looks a lot like that familiar thing we know as our gut feeling.
Next time somebody who just went through a messy breakup says that they always knew that the relationship would never work, it may not just be hindsight talking. In an intriguing new experiment on how much our automatic responses can tell us about what we really feel, a group of researchers discovered that there may be a test that predicts whether a marriage will last.
First, they asked more than 100 recently married people in Tennessee to rate their spouse. Unsurprisingly, everybody declared that their spouses were swell. Then they asked the folks to look at photos of their new spouse as they identified whether a word was negative or positive.
Having recorded those responses, the researchers then followed the couples for four years to see how the marriages fared. People who took a little longer to identify negative words or who more quickly identified positive words were more likely to be happily married at the end of the study than newlyweds whose responses went the other way, according to a new study in Science.
Category(s):Relationships & Marriage
Source material from http://healthland.time.com/2013/12/02/scientists-develop-a-love-test/
