Is the future of a newly married couple's success in their marriage better predicted by what is in their hearts or in their guts?
Under the assumption that members of the couple did not have food poisoning at the time of testing or some other gastrointestinal illness that is unrelated to their psychological "state", it appears that the guts have it. But don't take my word for it, look at the research. One popular media account is provided here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25129117 The procedure used in the research is somewhat similar to that used in the implicit association task (IAT). My understanding is that a typical trial has this structure: (1) A member of the couple to be married is shown a picture of their spouse-to-be for about 300ms, long enough to activate the conceptual representation the person has of their mate. (2) There *should* be an automatic evaluation triggered by the access of the mate's concept but is the evaluation positive (i.e., "true love") or negative (i.e., "this is not a good idea")? Reaction times (RT) to positive and negative words can provide insight into the type of automatic evaluation produced: a positive evaluation should result in faster RTs to positively valenced words (i.e., words like "good") while a negative evaluation should result in faster RTs to negatively valenced words (e.g., "pain"). (3) If one were to follow the married couple for several years, which would be a better predictor of the degree of satisfaction with the marriage: (a) Explicit measures such as responses to questionnaires and interviews (e.g., "This is the happiest day of my life!") or (b) Having a positive/negative automatic evaluation as indicated by the RT patterns? It looks like the guts have it. ;-) For those who are skeptical of populate media sources (and I know that all of you are, well, maybe outside of Georgia historians), here is a link to the research article that was published in Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6162/1119.abstract?sid=f362051b-5987-40e1-8a92-02d0084094b3 Here is the reference (not APA style) for the article: James K. McNulty, Michael A. Olson, Andrea L. Meltzer, and Matthew J. Shaffer (2013). Though They May Be Unaware, Newlyweds Implicitly Know Whether Their Marriage Will Be Satisfying Science 29 November 2013: 1119-1120. [DOI:10.1126/science.1243140] There are supplementary materials including a podcast interview with one of the authors. Access to the article and materials will probably require going through your university's library. One immediate extension of this research comes to mind. Consider the following: (A) Students attend the first class of course. (B) After the class meeting, they are given an RT task like the one above but now the stimuli are (a) the teacher from the class they were just in and (b) an unknown person matched for gender, age, and any other relevant characteristics. Positively and negatively valanced words are presented and RT are measured to determine if student have positive or negative "gut" reactions to teacher. (C) One should obtain ratings from the students about how interesting they found the teacher, the material presented, yadda-yadda, the usual stuff student evaluation of teachers contain. (D) The research question is which is a better predictor of the student's performance in the class: (i) the explicit evaluations or (ii) the type of automatic evaluation the student had. In extreme cases, whether the students stays in the course or not might be a clear result. (E) One could also repeat the measures after the end of the semester to see if there were changes since the start of the semester. Are the beginning of the semester measures better predictors of end of course performance or are the end of the semester measures? Do students engage in a "self-fulfilling prophecy" or do they change their automatic evaluation of the professor over the course of the semester? Remember: I'm a co-author for coming up with the idea. ;-) -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=30875 or send a blank email to leave-30875-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
