Will your marriage be a happy one? Only your subconscious will tell

Our deepest, darkest feelings affect how we interact with our spouses.

Kate Shaw Yoshida – Dec 11, 2013 11:36 am | 85

Newlyweds tend to wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to their outlook about marriage. But with up to half of all marriages in the US ending in divorce, most freshly minted couples would probably be interested to know how their partnership will end up. A new study in Science offers some insight: a newlywed’s subconscious feelings can tell a lot about how happy their marriage will be over the long term.

Psychologists contend that we have two layers of feelings. The first, called a “conscious attitude,” is what we generally think of when it comes to our innermost thoughts; it’s what you’d tell a close friend or confess in a diary. But we have another, deeper level of feelings as well. Psychologists refer to this as an “automatic attitude,” because it’s generally not something we are aware of. You know those movies in which someone’s deepest, darkest self is finally revealed to them—and it often isn’t pretty? That’s their automatic attitude. These subconscious feelings are too deep seated for a person to access—and therefore are relatively impervious to bias—but they likely play a large role in how we act and how we perceive the world.

After rounding up more than 100 newlywed couples in Tennessee, the researchers assessed each of these types of attitudes the couples held about their partners. They tested the 270 participants’ feelings when the study began, then again every six months for four years. First, to measure their conscious attitudes, each partner was asked to rate their marriage in terms of 15 pairs of words like “good” and “bad” and “satisfied” and “dissatisfied.”

Since you can’t simply ask someone about feelings they aren’t aware of, the scientists used a type of priming effect to access the participants’ automatic attitudes. Photos of the participant’s spouse were flashed for 300 milliseconds, just long enough to trigger their true feelings about their partner. Then, the person was asked to determine whether a word was positive (such as “awesome”) or negative (like “horrible”). Theoretically, someone happy with their spouse would be in the right mindset to identify a positive word quickly, whereas someone dissatisfied with their spouse would be primed to promptly recognize a negative word. Assessments like this one are called implicit association tests and are often used to quantify automatic attitudes like racism and sexism.

When the researchers compared these two attitudes, they found that the conscious feelings that people reported about their marriage were completely unrelated to their automatic attitudes; participants were unable to access—or perhaps unwilling to admit—their deep-seated feelings about their partner.

During each testing round, the researchers also asked each partner how happy they were in their marriage and how severe any marital problems were, and they compared these measures of marital satisfaction with the participants’ conscious and automatic attitudes. Participants’ conscious attitudes were unrelated to marital satisfaction over the four-year course of the study. However, a newlywed’s automatic attitude about his or her spouse was highly correlated with how happy they were in their marriage up to four years later.

Moreover, the participants’ automatic attitudes actually predicted how sour the marriage would go; the more negative a partner’s automatic attitude, the more their marital satisfaction declined over time. The researchers behind this study conclude that how we really feel about our partners colors our interactions with them. Positive automatic attitudes serve as a buffer, desensitizing us to the changes and challenges that come along with marriage.

Obviously, a lot of factors affect marriage satisfaction, and automatic attitudes are far from perfect predictors of our future. But our deepest, darkest feelings seem to affect how we grow, change, and interact, especially when it comes to relationships.

It’s tempting to use this study as a cautionary tale to “listen to your gut instincts” when it comes to getting married. But the catch here is that our automatic attitudes aren’t generally something we can (or are willing to) access, and, as the study found, our conscious attitudes often don’t match up with these deep-seated feelings. So although it’s a promising study in scientific terms, automatic attitudes may not have much to offer those that are considering taking the plunge.

Science, 2013. DOI: 10.1126/science.1243140 (About DOIs).