(upbeat music) - Hey, welcome everybody to Sci Pub.

We are very glad that you are here with us today.

And I wanna thank you for joining us this evening for a Virtual Science Pub Bing, Predicting Marital Success.

So I'm Nancy Coddington I am the Director of Science Content for WSKG Public Media, and I'm also one of the co-founders of Science Pub.

And I am joined this evening, one of the other co-founders Kristine Kieswer.

- Hi everyone, Kristine Kieswer here.

Nancy's partner in science crime.

When I moved here a few years ago I was hoping we could get Science Pub off the ground.

And thanks to Nancy and WSKG.

We not only got it off the ground, we've had amazing speakers, fantastic audiences.

We transitioned successfully through the pandemic and February is caused for a little extra celebration because it assigns Pub Bing's one year anniversary.

So congratulations to you.

- Yeah, well, congratulations to all of us especially everybody that tunes in monthly to join us.

You know, we only did two of these in-person before we did flip them virtually and very proud of all of the work that we have done.

And thank you for making that possible by tuning in and every month.

We also have WSKG science intern joining us.

And that is Julia Diana.

Hello, Julia.

She is a student at Binghamton University and she is going to be live tweeting in the event.

So if you like to be a multi-tasker and do more than one thing, you can go over to Twitter and follow the #WSKGscience.

And will go ahead and pop that into the chat.

So if you wanna go over and follow a conversation or have a conversation over there about tonight, you certainly can do that.

And then we're all here tonight to see our guest speaker who is Dr. Matthew Johnson, and hello to you.

Welcome, we are very glad that you are here with us tonight and going to be giving a great presentation.

We have a great turnout, lots of people interested in this topic tonight.

- Great, well, thanks, it's great to be here.

I appreciate you and the whole crew who inviting me, so it's great to be part of it, thank you.

- Okay, well, thank you.

So we are gonna go ahead and get started.

So if you haven't had a chance to grab yourself a little sip of something or a snack, here's your last moment to be able to do that.

And we're gonna go ahead and get started.

So tonight you are joining us predicting marital success.

You know, what better topic to explore in February for the scientific mysteries of love?

Why does one relationship last a lifetime while another fizzles?

For 20, years Dr. Johnson has been unraveling these mysteries and discovering some surprising clues.

This talk is shared open to your eyes to the many ways we support or sabotage the relationships we treasure the most.

Dr. Matthew Johnson is a professor of psychology at Binghamton University and he conducts clinical research examining the developmental course of marital and family dysfunction.

Extensions of his research research include programs designed to prevent marital stress, insights on genetic and hormonal influences on marital behavior and the prevention of intimate partner violence.

Welcome Dr. Matthew Johnson.

- Great, thank you.

Let me share my screen here and we'll get started.

Again, thank you so much for inviting me.

It's really great to be part of this and I'm a big fan of WSKG and so it's an honor to be invited.

Well, let's get started.

I like to start with one of my favorite poems and that is a poem by Langston Hughes, titled "Advice."

Folks, I'm telling you, birthing is hard and dying is mean.

So get yourself a little loving in between.

And it's a great poem generally, but for me, and for the purposes of our talk, it illustrates the importance and the centrality of intimate relationships in our lives.

And so to further illustrate this, let me ask you a question.

Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?

And that actually is our very first poll of the night.

So Nancy, can you walk us through how to do a poll?

- Absolutely.

So I just launched that poll and that has come up on your screen, hopefully.

If you don't see it, it might be behind your Zoom window.

And what you can do is this is an anonymous poll.

Nobody knows how you're voting tonight.

What's just important is that you are voting.

So go ahead and select overall, how satisfied are you with your life?

And that is up to you and your interpretation on what aspects of your life is your overall life or if you're gonna look at something a little bit more specific.

- And can the attendees see the results that I'm seeing?

- They are going to be able to see the results in here in just a moment.

- Okay.

- When I end the poll I'm gonna share the poll results so that we can all take peek at them.

- Oh, it looks like people are changing their answers as they move through, which is, the next questions will actually be quiz questions.

So there's, there's some science about changing your questions, changing your answers.

- Love that say, it's a moving poll.

Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and wrap this up.

So if you haven't voted, go ahead.

We're gonna end the poll and then I'm gonna go ahead and share the results so everybody can see.

- Okay, so it looks, well that's nice.

It looks like we have a pretty satisfied group here.

So that's good to see.

And the reason I asked the question is because how you answer that question is more likely to be predicted by your satisfaction with your current intimate relationship than your satisfaction with any other part of your life.

So let me repeat that.

So our overall happiness in life is most closely aligned with our happiness or lack thereof it with our intimate relationships.

So, and let me just pause for one moment for a definition here.

So when I say intimate relationships, what I mean by that are close relationships where there's at least at minimum, the potential for sex.

So I'm talking about relationships with a spouse or a boyfriend or girlfriend.

I'm not talking about parents or relationship with children or parents or coworkers or friends.

So that being said, some of what we'll talk about tonight with intimate relationships certainly applies to other close relationships, but for our purposes and since it's Valentine's Day is coming up, we're talking about intimate relationships.

So then back to the point here, intimate relationships are the most predictive aspect of our lives in terms of predicting our overall satisfaction.

But in addition to that, they're associated with nearly everything that we care about.

So this includes our physical health, our relationship quality or intimate relationship quality is correlated with our physical health in a way, and that's consistent whether we're measuring that molecularly or in terms of morbidity.

Simply put the quality of intimate relationships is a matter of life and death to the degree, so just as an example of that, if you have heart disease, you're more likely to live longer if you're in a good relationship than a bad one.

And not only is the association between physical health and relationship quality strong, it's consistent across races and ethnicities which is something that my student, Jared McShall and I demonstrated a few years back.

So it's also associated with mental health.

Relationship satisfaction is correlated and strongly predictive of, 10 of the most common, 10 of the most common 11 mental health disorders.

So 10 out of 11 of the most frequent mental health illnesses are strongly associated with our relationship quality.

And again, as Jared and I demonstrated a different paper that's consistent across races and ethnic groups.

It's relationship satisfaction is also associated with our job performance, including tardiness and absenteeism.

And so there's a pretty big impact on our lives, both in terms of our individual lives, in terms of the money we'll make and our wealth, as well as at a societal level, in terms of GDP and other factors, you can measure this in a variety of different ways.

And then finally, relationships quality is associated with relationships stability or in other words divorce or dissolution.

And that is of course an, you know, probably an obvious point, but it matters because going back to our life satisfaction, getting divorced is one of the few things that will knock your life satisfaction down and keep it down.

So generally speaking, when you look at the literature on overall life satisfaction, something good might happen, you might get a promotion or a raise at work and your life satisfaction will go up for a little while and then come back down.

And there some folks who talk about this as the sort of that he hedonic treadmill that we're always trying to find that thing that'll keep our satisfaction up and stay up.

And similarly, when bad things, you might have a setback at work or lose a friend, your satisfaction with life will go down for a bit, but usually on average it comes back up to a baseline.

Whereas divorce is one of the few things that will knock it down and it won't recover.

So this graph is from the primary source article that demonstrated this.

So let me turn on my pointer here.

So this here on the Y-axis is life satisfaction in standard deviation units.

And you can see in the years prior divorce, it's dropping, that's not a surprise, it's what probably leads to divorce, but after the divorce it does not make it back up to this baseline.

So it's, it's a very impactful.

So the point of all of this is that the quality of our intimate relationships really, really matters.

So given all that, hopefully I've convinced you that they matter.

You're here probably 'cause you think they matter.

So then that brings us to the question of, well what predicts relationship satisfaction or relationship quality?

I'll use those interchangeably tonight.

And so that brings us to our, this is not a poll, this is a pop quiz.

So my question is what do you think is the most predictive factor in terms of relationships success or dissolution?

And I decided to make this one a multiple choice one.

So, and it looks like Nancy's already got it up.

Thank you, Nancy.

- So again, this is anonymous.

Nobody can see what you are choosing.

So please go ahead and participate in the question in our pop quiz tonight, what's most predictive of relationship success or dissolution.

- I'll get to that.

- I'm curious to hear what you're gonna say about changing, changing the way that you vote.

- I'm this is, this is make me, it's good thing that I don't do tests in my classes this way.

Otherwise I just start giggling in the middle of tests.

- Well, that would be a giveaway.

- Yeah.

- Cancun.

Well, the last moment to go ahead and enter your choice if you haven't done so, I'm gonna go ahead and end this and share the results.

- Look at that.

Communication, by a country mile, is the winner.

and then followed by partner support, then personal history.

Wow, so class, you all failed, I'm afraid.

It's aggression, aggression.

Well, not, one of you passed.

I don't know who that was but somebody's getting a passing grade here, aggression beats them all.

The biggest predictor of divorce or dissolution is being physically aggressive or violent, even in a relationship.

And so, and I've always, we'll talk more about that.

I'm gonna come back to violence in just a moment, but I've always had this, maybe now that I'm on WSKG here, I've had this, imagine this advertising campaign, 'Cause why do people get physically aggressive in their relationships it's very often 'cause they really value, you know, they get their energy, they want their relationships to succeed and yet in the heat at that moment then they get aggressive and that actually drives the partner away.

And I feel like if we just have like ad campaign men, hitting her is the way to get her to leave you or something like that, I'll work with someone more creative on the copy for that.

Anyway, we will come back to aggression, but I'm really happy that you all picked communication that 78% of you, 31 out of 40 picked communication.

'Cause, let's talk about that.

So this is a science talks.

So let's give you a background on communication, 'cause you're not alone.

A lot of us thought it was communication.

And so that really comes out of something called social learning theory.

And so anyone who's had an introductory to psychology course probably remembers Pavlov and his dogs and the basic idea, ignore the word social for just a moment, learning theory right, is the basic idea that behaviors that are rewarded will be repeated and behaviors that are punished won't be repeated.

That's the idea, that's a overly simplistic idea of learning theory.

And so Albert Bandura back in the '60s said, well, he applied this to how humans interact with other humans and our interactions with each other, that if we find an interaction rewarding, we'll keep doing that, and if we find an interaction punishing, we'll stop doing that.

And so this is the real building block of a lot of what we do in psychology.

And in my case, particularly in clinical psychology, this is a way that we understand and treat behavioral problems and mental illnesses.

And so one of the things that really attracted me to Binghamton University, you know, over 20 years ago now, was the strong empirical basis of our psychology department here and how they really focused on behavioral approaches.

So just as an example, we're still doing that, we have colleagues doing that with addiction, in fact, I think one of them is on the call here, I've colleagues using this in the treatment of anxiety disorders and depression, and had a healthy, had engaged in healthier behaviors.

And we have an entire Institute on campus at Binghamton University devoted to applying these principles.

My colleagues, Jen Gillis (mumbles) apply these principles to their work with children with autism spectrum disorders.

So, but in My career and what we've done as relationship scientists is we've applied this to marriage.

And so here's what this looks like in marriage and its most basic.

We have couples exchange positive and negative behaviors or what you all just called communication.

And then couples learn from each of these interactions.

And from these, they learned about the quality of their relationship.

They make judgements about how their relationship is going from these exchanges of behavior.

And then they accumulate these experiences in specific interactions.

And this either builds up satisfaction or wears it down changing how then we exchange further behaviors with each other or how we communicate with each other.

And this is the, this is a real foundational model for the science of intimate relationships for a long time.

And you can see in my notes here, this really came out of the late '60, early '70s.

So this is again, I wanna focus on the science of this, since this is in a science talk and we all know there's four things that make a good scientific theory, a scientific theory good.

A compelling theory is causal, it is observable, it's parsimonious and it's testable.

And this social learning theory in terms of marriage has all four of these things.

It offers a plausible causal mechanism that's presumed to drive judgments of relationship satisfaction stability, it outlines observable and potentially modifiable processes.

It's very simple.

Notice I did not talk about your relationship with your mother in there, I did not talk about, you know, your dreams or your past lives or anything like that.

It's a nice simple model.

And then finally it's a testable model.

And I've spent a lot of my career testing it.

And the other thing with this is it really appeals to people.

Couples like this model.

And the logic and simplicity of this makes sense to people, 'cause how else do we, let me put it this way, when I talk to couples about their relationship, what do they say to me?

They start to describing their interactions with their partner.

That's one of the first things that they do.

And I think you'll find that people do that in a lot of ways when they start talking about the relationships.

So this, the logic of simplicity of this works in many ways.

And just to give you one more example of how well it works, this is the most emailed article from the New York times ever was "What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage."

And if you haven't read this essay, it's worth looking it up.

So essentially the reporter, Amy Sutherland went to cover how animals are trained at SeaWorld and learned all about how they stop reinforcing behaviors they don't want, how they reward behaviors they do want, and she applied those principles to her husband.

It's funny, great essay.

It's worth a read.

And so again, people love this model.

I love this model.

Here's the problem.

So after applying social learning theory to the studying the ideology, the prevention, the treatment of marital problems for 30 years, I just don't think it's the right approach.

And what I hope to do tonight is make the case and present an alternative approach.

And first, so first let me just convince you that I don't think this model is working well enough on its own right now.

And I'll share some of my findings from my lab.

So the first is just communication.

So again, 78% of you said communication would be a big predictor.

And I thought so too.

And I spent a good chunk of my career thinking that and working on that.

And I'm not alone.

So John Gottman, I think a lot of you you've probably heard of John Gottman.

He built his career on coming up with a model based on this.

And, and so a lot of his research on this is not, and his principles are not really panning out as well.

And so for example, I tried replicating his finding that anger is okay, in a relationship, you can be angry with your spouse and you can exhibit anger but contempt is bad, so bad.

He calls it one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

And using his own system, we couldn't even distinguish anger and contempt, much less have them predict differently.

Similarly, I tried, I said, okay, so that didn't work, so one of the things that I tried to do was say let's look at communication both.

If we separate out the content, in other words what's being said from the effect, which is the effect, meaning the outward expression of emotion.

And maybe if I could perse those out and I did this with newlyweds, within six months of their marriage, of their wedding, and then we tracked them for the next four years.

And, you know, what I predicted was there'd be a nice, you know, additive effect that, you know, if you were saying mean things to your partner and you were communicating in a really dysfunctional way and you were acting in a way that was angry or contemptuous that would predict steeper declines in relationship satisfaction.

What I found was there was only if you had both negative content and really negative effect was the only time it actually predicted drops and satisfaction.

So that's good news for folks generally, but bad news for the model, it was complicated and it was more complicated than I expected.

Similarly, a colleague in the Netherlands and I looked at about how much people are fighting during the first pregnancy of the couple and it only weakly predicted relationship quality.

And then, and then finally we thought, well, instead of looking newlyweds, why not, well look before the couple gets married.

And so my colleague, Rich Mattson here at Binghamton University and a former student of mine named Laura Frame looked at communication before marriage and how it predicted over time the first few years of marriage.

And it was a very complicated picture.

We only were, you know, we did not get the findings We thought we only found that the association was there when we really looked at with fine detail at both the communication and then Rich, very cleverly, separated out positive effects of satisfaction and negative effects.

He kind of separated what's good about your relationship or what's bad about your relationship and how you feel about those things.

And that was the only way in which we found these effects.

And again, you know, people are complicated.

I don't mind complicated findings but it's not what the theory was predicting.

So I really think there's a problem there.

And this is just in terms of what predicts.

I'll just quickly state that behavioral treatments of marital discord are also no better than other treatments of marital discord, like of the other accepted treatments of, other accepted couples therapies.

You know, so I'm not talking about, you know, the real unorthodox treatments.

And so the good news is that we've got a pretty good chance of helping you if you go to a competent therapist and you have marital problems.

There's a decent chance that we can help a little under half the couples who go to couples therapy with a good therapist.

And after treatment, no different from couples who are not seeking marital therapy.

And that's not a great statistic, I think we would all like that to be, you know, better than a little under 50%, but for our purpose here, the other, the point is that there's no incremental advantage for treatments that focus on communication.

And so, so no difference there.

And that, again, another ding in the social learning theory, Armour, I think.

Then finally we've also tried using this to prevent, instead of treating marital problems to prevent marital problems.

And so a lot of folks have worked on this.

And so you may or may not have heard of the prevention, Preventative Relationship Enhancement Program, it's program at University of Denver I worked on actually as a undergrad.

But others have the, you know, there's you may have maybe, you know, have engaged encounter.

There's a few of these types of programs and, you know, and the initial results, these that, and they really focus on communication.

And the initial results of these were promising when couples self-select into the treatment versus the control group the results were pretty good.

The problem is when you randomly assign people to treatment versus control group, the effects really diminish or go away completely.

And again, for our purposes, the important thing here is that there really is no advantage for treatments that focus on communication and I could give a whole nother talk.

And in fact, I gave one for our alumni on homecoming weekend, a few years back on a study we did trying to improve on this by focusing on empathy.

And I'll just cut to the chase.

If you focus on communication or empathy, we compared those two treatments to just couples who watched movies about relationships, or rom-coms, if you will, and then talked about how those rom-coms related to their relationship.

And that was the couple, that was the group that did the best in some ways, but mostly it was no different from any of the other ones.

So you can avoid talking to people like me by simply watching a romantic comedy and talking about the movie with your spouse.

So we even have a list of movies that we had them watch and in which we can share at some point.

So this has, and again, I can talk for an hour on this alone but this has massive public policy implications because starting back in the Clinton administration, every administration, whether it's Democrat or Republican and with bipartisan support in Congress has taken some money out of the federal welfare budget and devoted it to these kinds of programs that teach people relationship skills with the idea of being that married couples are less likely to be in poverty.

There's a little bit of a correlation causation problem with that reasoning, but again, that's a whole nother talk that I won't get into but it does have big implications.

So I'm not alone in losing my faith in our focus on social learning theory for many practitioners as well as researchers that focus on communication without an examination of other factors is akin to treating symptoms instead of the underlying infection.

And it reminds me of a couple who I saw in my practice, who, you know, they came in as they do, right, they sat down I asked, why are you sitting here in front of me?

And the couple looked at each other and the husband said, well, we have a problem with communication.

And the wife looked at him and I looked at her and she said, yes, the problem is you failed to communicate that you were having an affair.

So it is worth de-emphasizing communication sometimes.

And I think this is all captured by a colleague of mine at NYU who cogently observed that a conceptualization of the husband is unhappy because he doesn't communicate well, is about as useful conceptualization as the patient died because his heart stopped beating.

And I, I love that quote and it really captures it for me.

I think, you know, the exclusion of potentially influential factors that are beyond this theory leads to other limitations and it really highlights some of the problems.

And again, this theory, and just focusing on communication, doesn't help us understand couples who have a different developmental pathway.

So there are couples who, for example, spontaneously improve, and this theory doesn't really account for those couples.

There are other couples who cycle rapidly through negative and positive phases and this doesn't explain that that either.

So the field really is kind of confronting and conundrum.

And although there's no denying the importance of communication in our work, and we're just having trouble demonstrating that it's that influential in terms of predicting relationship outcomes.

And I say that as someone who's made it my career to prove that that is the case.

So, but again, we're in a science talk and I'm a scientist and I think the important thing is to look at your data and admit when it's not supporting what you thought to be true.

So I think we need a more dynamic version of of this and how we think about it.

And, you know, I know this is science talk again, I think I've said that five times now, but WSKG also focuses on the arts and here I think the artists and the humanists are way ahead of us scientists on this.

And just to give one of a thousand or 10,000 examples of this, there's a short, fictional essay by Richard Bausch called a "Letter to the Lady of the House."

And you can also listen to it on this American Life where the author reads it.

And it's really nice, it's, you know, it's a letter in which he, on the Eve of his 70th birthday narrates a letter to his wife, Marie at 50 years, and ended they're struggling with bitterness and pain in their communication with each other.

And they have quarrels basically daily, you know.

And, but the narrator moves past these and moves past the social learning model, moves past communication to get a deeper truth about their marriage and relationships.

So it's, it's again, it's a nice way to bring the arts into what we really are trying to capture with our science.

So here's my proposal that we de-emphasize social learning model and emphasize the following: First, there are interpersonal behaviors that are strongly associated with dissolution and dysfunction in relationships.

And why not pick some of these low hanging fruits?

So I'm thinking about infidelity or as we mentioned before aggression.

So we've done a bit of looking at this and we know that aggression and intimate partner violence are the number one predictor of relationship dissolution.

Yet as a field, we have not done a great job of figuring out how to assess intimate partner violence very well.

We do do a good job, there's a great instrument and there are good instruments for assessing lethality, if in cases of violence, there's work out of Johns Hopkins and other places that do a nice job of that but we don't do a good job of assessing it at or fine grain level.

And including, and so my student, Erin Alexander, current doctoral student is working on this.

And she's working on a way of reliably distinguishing two types of intimate partner violence.

And so what are those two types of intimate partner violence?

I'm just gonna take a little sidetrack into this cul-de-sac, we'll come back out in a second.

There are two types of IPV.

The first is situational couple violence and these are the most common forms of violence.

These are heated arguments that escalate to assault and these are tend to be reactive.

They, you know, these are kind of arguments that get too hot, heated and interestingly, they're initiated equally by men and women.

And as a clinician, I think this last point on this one is important.

We think these are reasonably amenable, relatively low levels of violence that are situational, or may be treatable in couples therapy.

And so the other type of violence is what is often called intimate terrorism.

Sometimes it's been called a patriarchal terrorism.

And this is about dominating or subjugating a partner and control is the defining feature.

and it's almost always initiated by the man.

And the best treatment here is to become unavailable to the perpetrator.

And so that's why I encourage everyone to support your local domestic violence shelter.

Here in Broome County, New York, our shelter is Rise and they're a great organization, and I'm sure they could use your financial and volunteer help.

And again, I always, so I always include this slide because if you're talking about intimate relationships unfortunately you have to talk about violence.

And so that's why it took us down this culs-de-sac, the fact is it's unfortunately part of relationships and one of the most dangerous things a woman can do is actually enter into a relationship with a man.

So that's why I always try to include this slide.

So let's leave this culs-de-sac and come back to the point here, about de-emphasizing social learning, the model.

The other thing that we can do is we can talk about enduring vulnerabilities.

I'll go through this fairly quickly but we know that if there are certain things that are enduring, that make it hard for people to have good relationships.

So my former students Zach Collins here, who's now an army psychologist at Fort Drum.

He did a study looking at neuroticism, sometimes called that negative effect, you know, think like Charlie Brown, right.

So, you know, Charlie Brown is gonna have a hard time with his intimate relationships when he grows up, I think, you know, and he's not gonna have that, you know, at that point snoopy, will just be as password for his email.

So he won't have a cute dog to help him.

So, you know, so there are other things that we know are enduring vulnerabilities and make having relationships harder.

The good news is we can look at how those interact with communication and there are viable and good treatments for some of these things.

We can, we're doing good work as a field of psychology and working with things like personality disorders or other other problems that can lead to relationship problems.

So then we've covered those two.

Then finally, I think we really need to look at the interaction between context and interpersonal behavior.

So I also noticed in that nobody on our poll, in that quiz picked contextual stress, which I found really interesting considering we're all living in a pandemic and we're all, you know, locked in our houses with our partners.

So I think contextual stress is a big predictor.

And we do know that, I mean, that's very clear.

So, you know, this link between contextual stress and relationship quality, this is huge.

And we know this from all kinds of data that, you know, just to name one, you know, people who you are living at or near the poverty line, have tougher relationships.

And which just makes sense, if you're working three jobs and, you know, taking a bus to and from work and having to make sure that schools do right by your kids, you know, you don't have time and energy to invest in your relationship when you get home.

And that just makes sense and it, and is born out by the data.

And so what we can look at then is how do our communication behaviors and other aspects of our relationships influence this association.

And so to give a sense of this, if we're talking about contextual stress, then the question is how do you support your spouse?

And a lot of couples talk about, you know, their spouse, you know, the support they got from the person in their life is the reason they married them.

And you hear a lot of people say I married my best friend and that sort of thing.

So how is the, what is the best way to support your spouse?

So that leads to the third and final quiz question.

And that is, imagine that your spouse or partner says I want to lose weight, so I'm going on a diet.

What is the right response?

- At the poll here.

- And now I've decided to take it a little easy on you and make this a multiple choice.

So there are your options and I'll see what you say.

So, all right, okay.

Nancy, I can't remember.

Did I tell you what the right answer is yet?

- Yeah, and the right answer was to just leave the house and don't come back.

(Nancy and Mathew laughs) - Flee.

- That's my that's my go-to.

- Yeah, that's actually a, that would, you'd be in good company a lot of, that's fleeing is what a lot of, we have a whole theory in intimate relationship research called the demand withdrawal.

So one partner demands something and the other partner just fleas, withdraws.

So you'd be in, you'd be in good company.

- I could be in good company, I've actually seen that in play.

(Nancy and Mathew laughs) - We all have as both the demand or/and the withdrawal, I suspect.

- Right, absolutely.

Okay, we still have a couple of people who haven't selected their answer and if it's not the best one, I mean pick what would be closest maybe to what you'd say or maybe you're like me and you're just gonna flee, we're all going to run away together, you can pop that in the chat (laughs) I'm gonna go ahead and close the poll and share the results.

- Okay, so I'll go on a diet with you.

What a sweet, nice answer.

Oh, look at all these nice people out there.

And I also like, sort of, that was wow.

And then there were 11 brave souls who say, I agree, you should lose weight.

That's I, we should, I know it's anonymous poll but we should probably work with those folks.

Then, and then there's some other six wonderfully sweet people who said you don't need to go into, you're just perfect.

Now, so there is a right answer.

And then there's a second to best answer.

And they are the two answers that got the least votes.

So, so the right answer is not taking your eyes off the television and you give a perfunctory response, okay.

And if you didn't do that one, then fine but I'm not eating your diet food.

- That surprises me.

- I'm fine with being overweight myself.

Yeah, so we'll talk about that.

And let me talk about that on the next slide and why that, why we think that was the answer, but this is from empirical study and I put this book up here, this is not my book in full disclosure.

It was written by my mentor and a colleague of mine who has collaborated with but this book is essentially this question and in a long book form about how to support your spouse in their effort to be more healthy.

So let's talk about why that was the case.

So social support is really complicated.

So if we're gonna talk about contextual stress we're gonna talk about how we support each other when things are stressful and sometimes support is good.

So newlyweds who display more emotional support and practical support report higher marital satisfaction.

And if you want a great book about this one, you can read the first-person account of Christopher Reeves and his wife, Dana, who have talked about how they support each other after he was paralyzed.

And so, but it is complicated.

And this book, by the way, it's called "Still Me Still Us."

So the question that I noted there, pardon me I'm having a little trouble with my cursor, was basically they found that women who were going on a diet and then they randomly assigned their husbands to different roles and some of them were supposed to be very supportive and helpful and went on the diet with them.

Others didn't work, didn't go on the diet with them but they like ate their potato chips in the closet and that kind of thing.

And then the others, they just did nothing like just ignored the whole thing and then I think, I can't remember if they had an actively discouraging group or not, but it was the ones who did nothing were the most, lost the most weight and did the best.

And this kind of finding has been repeated over time.

The heart attack victims recover more quickly with less spousal support.

And so our field has been trying to pull this apart and it looks like invisible support, support that your partner doesn't even know you're giving is the best kind.

And, and the study that really demonstrated this, and this has been replicated a few times now, there are some nuances that doesn't replicate in some scenarios that does in others.

But they had a study where couples were, were one partner in the couple of studying for the bar exam.

And if any of you have lawyers in your families you know what or deal that is.

And so, and they simply asked them, they asked the person studying for the exam, you know, how much did your partner support you today?

Both emotionally or practical support.

And the more they said they did, the more they reported being depressed and anxious that day.

And on days when the partner said, yeah, I did a lot of supporting today, but the test taker, didn't say that, those were the days test taker reported the less depression and anxiety.

So it's a complicated phenomenon and there's lots of work to do for it.

And I see we're running a little low on time.

I'll just zip through these very quickly, but we're working on this in the model that I showed you before, we're working on applying this model to the work in the lab and it's really driving our work in the lab right now.

And so let me just give you a couple examples of that.

Haley Fivecoat is a former student of mine.

She's now on the faculty at Northwestern in the Family Institute at Northwestern University.

And she looked at families that are, we call them, they're called fragile families, we kinda come up with that name.

And so families who are living at or near the poverty line, have children and are really struggling.

And she found that invisible support was working and help those couples stay together over time as well.

And so it, it worked in similar ways as it does with middle class families And Jared McShall, who, again, a former student of mine, he looked at how the quality of our intimate relationships can moderate or change.

So we know the perceived discrimination, and by perceived discrimination I mean, literally the discrimination that someone perceives is occurring to themselves, is we know that's correlated with health outcomes and Jared was able to show that that association could be moderated by the quality of their intimate relationships.

And then finally, my student a former student, Karen Aizaga, and by the way Jared is now in private practice down in the Westchester area.

My student, Karen Aizaga she took a different approach.

She looked at, the stressor that she looked at was not being well acculturated here.

So, you know, usually we just kind of think of that, especially if you don't speak the language.

So Latinx families, members who, you know, don't necessarily speak English, we know that they struggle and that's associated with having lower relationship quality.

Again, it's a stressor, these stressors are all associated with lower relationship quality, but she saw that familismo, this concept of familismo, which is a, again, a Latinx idea that's a strong sense of identification with a loyalty to the nuclear or extended family.

The more you endorsed familismo, the more it seemed to impact that association between not being cultivated and having a lower relationship quality.

And she said, she's now working at a community clinic in the Bronx and is an adjunct professor of psychology at Dan Queens College.

So that's, that's it.

I'm gonna stop talking now, just for just as a reminder of what we've covered here, I think we're overemphasizing communication.

I think scientists have been, clinicians have been and couples have been, and I think we really need to reallocate our resources toward violence, enduring vulnerabilities, we can treat these, I promise you there's very effective treatments, some of which are being developed by my colleagues here at Binghamton University.

And we need to focus on contextual stress.

We really want to make it so that more people, you know we're taking this money out of the welfare system.

So people have better relationships actually turns out it's the opposite.

If we gave people more money and more resources and we lift them out of poverty, they'll probably have an easier time maintaining their relationships.

So in conclusion then, a final thing I'll say here is, you know, I noted that I've been working on this for 30 years, what I really learned here is that I agree with the definition of Ambrose, by Ambrose Bierce and the Devil's Dictionary, his definition of education which is a noun that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

So hopefully I haven't seem too foolish and acknowledging my lack of understanding.

And if you want to know more about what we thought we understood and we don't about intimate relationships, did I mention that I wrote a book about "Great Myths of Intimate Relationships," and go through a lot of what we think we know but don't in intimate relationships.

So with that, I just wanna say thank you to my former and current students.

I've mentioned some of them, not all of them in this talk, they're great.

My patients are, I learned a ton from them.

I've learned a lot from my former and current colleagues in psychology.

Thank you to Nancy and Kristine and others who've helped with getting ready for this.

And as always, thank you to my wife, Deanne, you know, there's a quote by Goethe, he is the happiest, be king or peasant who finds peace in his home and Deanne's made my home and my life more peaceful and happy than I ever dared dream it could be itself, thank you.

So I am ready to take some questions if you are, Nancy.

- I am, great, thank you so much, Dr. Johnson.

Before we dive into some questions, there was quite a bit of a chat going on about the weight loss, as you can imagine.

- Oh, really, I am so surprised.

- That's why I was clean.

So I'm just gonna address that before we dive into the other questions, but I'm looking at someone who is morbidly obese could say, could say there's someone who's anorexic, could also say this I don't understand how you can scientifically put this all in one bucket and get something meaningful out of it.

- Say that, so let me make sure I understood the question.

If someone's morbidly obese, could you repeat the second part of the question?

I'm sorry.

- So you're looking at both extremes of the spectrum.

You have somebody who's morbidly obese but you also have somebody who's anorexic and they said they're not supporting either way.

You're putting everybody in one bucket, you know.

- Yes, that's right, that's right.

And, you know, and, and that, I guess my question was geared for someone much more in the middle of those two extremes, you know, the great many of us Americans who could stand to lose, you know, five, 10 30 pounds somewhere in that range.

But the book, the book that I mentioned kind of goes through a lot of those things and it includes things like exercise.

And was not just about losing weight.

Of course, we all know that, you know, that the weight is not a great indicator of health.

And so I think, I think the ways to support a spouse or a partner who is trying to get healthier again, it's it really is complicated.

I mean, that's a, that's a tough one.

And I guess the other thing I'll just make a note of here is I'm a little worried about the equivalency of someone who's morbidly obese with anorexia.

The anorexia is really, you know, can be a very serious mental health issue.

And, you know, and obesity is not characterized as a mental illness and certainly there's psychological components to it for sure and can be treated psychologically, but it's those, I just I'm a little worried about, you know, doing an equivalency on those two things.

- Sure, absolutely.

So we're staying on this theme for just a moment, you know, talking about that invisible support, what about over the long-term?

Did invisible support help people keep the weight off which is, which is harder than just losing it, right?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so, right, I know.

So a lot of the research on invisible support is actually not so much been about weight loss.

And so it's usually most of that research has been on other types of stressors, like a, usually stressors outside of the relationships, but so it could be weight loss, but it also could you know, there's jobs stress is a lot of that.

You know, there's a very famous study that was done a long long time ago, remember back, for those old enough to remember back in the '80s how we were all worried about air traffic controllers and the stress of their jobs.

And so there were studies of air traffic controllers if they have a bad day, they come home, what's the best thing to do?

Do you, you know, bring them supper and you wait on them hand him food and say, let's talk about honey, tell me about your day where you leave them alone.

And actually there were, the study it was a kind of a dramatic study, the more they left them alone actually improves the relationship quality.

But interestingly, it actually cut back on that, again this is a different time, '70s and '80s, but it cut back on corporal punishment of the children as well.

So it was, you know, I think there, it is the invisible support, it is fascinating.

And I think the bottom line is if, if support is asked for, it's good.

Generally speaking, if someone is saying, I need X, that would really support me, you should believe them.

The data are pretty clear on that, that if the support that is desired, is good, you should give that.

Where you want it to be more invisible, so if you think, you know, I think this would really help.

Maybe I'll sneak this in, you know, so that kind of support is, is what, it looks like is better if it's invisible and then of course support they don't want is perhaps not something you should give.

- Can you give some examples of invisible support, with what does the, what would that look like?

- Sure.

You know, I think in these studies that have been done, often it's, so, again, we're talking about we make the general distinction between emotional support and practical support.

So the practical support, may, any, you know, taken, you know, putting the kids to bed when it's not your turn, taking care of the dishes even though it's not your turn, you know, those kinds of small, practical support things really matter.

And then I'll say, you know, I think if we look at our own lives, we know it matters that these really do, these small things ultimately are ways of saying, I love you and you know, and not doing them can be interpreted as a lack of respect or lack of interest, and ultimately if you don't respect or your not interested in someone, how can you love them?

And that's how that can be interpreted on the receiving end when there's not that support.

- Thank you.

And how is invisible support related to an extension, extinction strategy, not rewarding dysfunction with over attention?

- Yeah, yeah.

That's a sophisticated question, I like it.

So, you know, so extinction, just, So the idea with extinction, it's a learning principle.

So that's what she learned with Shamu.

So we so often end up rewarding behaviors that we don't wanna reward, right.

So when Shamu would splash around and, you know splash the trainer and thought it was hilarious as Keller Wells I apparently do think, you know, they would freeze.

The trainers would literally just freeze.

'Cause sometimes you don't even know what you're doing that's rewarding it.

And so, and so that kind of freeze strategy would work on extinguishing those behaviors.

And that's part of, he read that article, she says what she applies to her relationship, that freezing strategy.

She would literally just freeze if she, if her husband was like, I think rampaging around the house looking for his keys, if I remember correctly.

So the invisible support there, let's just take that example from that New York times article, the behavior she wanted to extinguish was his pounding around the house, frantically getting the entire family in a tizzy 'cause he couldn't find his car keys and so she would just freeze while she's doing it, instead of joining the fray and ending up rewarding, that behavior by having everyone in the house, looking for dad's car keys.

So, so she would freeze, so the invisible support mechanism of that might be if she sees his keys are not where they're supposed to be, when they're not, if they're supposed to be sitting, you know, in the, the key spot on that key hook by your garage door or what have you, then she might go hang those up without ever mentioning that she moved those to him.

So that could be an example of an invisible support with an extinction strategy.

- Okay, thank you.

We're gonna jump back to the graph- - I'm not able to hear you Nancy.

- How about now, can you hear me okay?

- Let me see.

- How about now?

- Yeah, let me try one more thing.

Can I try one more time, Nancy?

- Sure, no problem.

Got another question here, Jumping back to- - Sorry, I don't know.

Let me, I'm gonna unplug.

- The unplug and replug is the, always the answer.

It seems.

- Okay I could, when I unplug.

Let's go that way.

- Okay.

So we're gonna jump back to the graph that you showed in the beginning, looking at the divorce satisfaction.

And so this says couple of different questions that are layered into a statement.

So how long post-divorce has the satisfaction rating been studied?

I wonder if satisfaction improves back to baseline after many decades or another marriage?

Has anyone studied this in regards to marriages that started out poorly?

- Yeah, that's a great question.

So the only, these are from, you know, of course we're talking about really longitudinal studies here.

So I am trying to remember that off the top of my head.

I believe that it did not go, so the graph I showed was six years post-divorce but I believe that study ultimately had maybe 10, 20 years, I don't remember off the top of my head, it's a good question.

I'll just forever ask the question, the figure that I showed was from the author of the "Statistics Lucas," L-U-C-A-S, and it was published in 2005.

If they email me I'll give them the full citation.

- Okay, thank you.

Is there any data that's come out yet on partner violence in the United States during the last year with quarantine?

- No, you know, that's a great question.

And I don't know the answer, but it's, we're all very worried about it.

I will say that.

You know, all I have are anecdotal reports and with honestly with IPB and to be perfectly honest, the bigger concern for a lot of us in this business are, is child abuse.

And we're all worried, we're very worried about that.

You know, honestly, because the reporting has gone down that on paper, it looks like there's less, which none of us believe is happening.

So, we're worried.

So, I am, but I don't, I don't have, I don't know of data on that.

- Okay, thank you.

What sort of premarital counseling might make a real difference?

People seem to seek counseling when too much damage has already been done.

- Well, you know, that's a good, well, first, you know, it's a good question.

I mean, I wrestled with this a lot, because again, I spent you know, 10, 15 years of my career trying to prevent relationship problems and not getting great results.

So, you know, like if I'm, you are, if the question is I'm gonna go to premarital counseling, what's the best one I should do, then, you know, the good news is I think they work about the same.

I would say PREP is a good one, It's run out like, say university, if you just Google PREP you'll see how Dr. Markman and Scott Stanley developed it.

It's a solid one.

I think there's similar findings from the one that Gottman developed.

And so, you know, but again, I think the key, what our data suggest is for most people, attending to your relationships, simply have a sitting down you don't need one of us.

You can watch a rom-com, you can sit down and talk about your relationship and how things applied to your relationship.

And I think that attention and attending to your relationship is what will help you primarily.

The other part of that question is an interesting one 'cause I think you said, you know, 'cause you wanna focus on it before problems arise, well, but the catch of that is actually, couples who go to premarital counseling or go to these kinds of preventative programs, after problems arise are the ones who actually do the best.

So these programs do better with couples that already have problems.

And there's actually, there was one study I know of, and I don't know that it's been replicated with the engaged encounter, you know, where they actually had made things worse with couples that were doing pretty well, that it looked like they were kind of raising issues but not helping the couples address those issues.

But if you're, you know, so it's been interesting.

And so I think the couples who get those premarital programs or, you know, preventative programs and they're already having problems, do pretty well in them.

The other, the other population that seems to do quite well with those programs better than a general population are families, couples who are in the military active duty or veteran couples where at least one member was active at duty or a veteran.

And a colleague of mine at BMT Universities knows a lot more about that than I do.

Kristine in a program in Durbin is studying that.

And, but there's some promising results there.

- Okay, thank you.

So this is a two people have a very similar question.

So I'm gonna kind of wrap them up together.

Have you examined past relationship history as a factor in assessing future relationships?

So for example, if you don't have a family model of a healthy romantic relationship, you know, how much of a setback is that going to be for you?

- Yeah, so there, that's a really great question.

So there are studies that look at that.

And so there's a this, it is probably a little easier with the graph, but in, so when children are, so parents get divorced, what is the, I'm gonna restate the question, parents get divorced, what's the impact on the children in terms of their adult relationships once they grow up.

And so the answer is that it looks like if the kids saw their parents divorce coming and that divorce actually diminished the amount of conflict that the children witnessed, then it benefit, then they had better relationship outcomes as adults, when those kids grew up and had their own relationships.

If the kids didn't see the divorce coming and it was a surprise to them or that the divorce came and it did not diminish the drama in their parents arguments and whatnot, then those kids had worse relationship outcomes.

And so it's a really interesting, I actually use those data when I teach interaction effects in stats.

It's an interesting finding and, you know, we could probably talk all night just about that finding alone.

I wanna say one thing before we move on that if you do a little of your own Googling about that research, do know that there is a one particular study that has done a great job of getting a lot of press that is fraudulent and just untrue study, and it was a, there's a group did a study, they really wanted to do a study on showing that children raised in same-sex families, some didn't do well as adults and they've made up their data, I don't know.

I mean, it's been retracted, it's a terrible study, but it's still out there floating around the internet and part of that was divorced families.

And so there's a lot of, there's, there are some bad data floating around there.

So be careful, buyer beware when you're looking at those studies.

- Well, that's part of science, right, interpreting the data.

Question on child abuse reporting, is it down because kids are not in school and schools are mandatory reporters?

- Yes.

- And Larissa who joins us from Australia she's been to many of our Sci Pubs.

So, hey, Larissa.

She put a link into the chat and saying in Australia that the reports have increased on domestic violence and what's happening over there during quarantine.

Thank you for that link, Larissa, and thanks for joining us.

- Maybe one of the many things that Australia does better than us.

- Can you talk a little bit about how your research on marital counseling and couples skills programs that were part of the welfare reform efforts were essentially inconsequential for poor and working class folks?

- Yeah, so, so there's the legislation that took the money out of the federal welfare budget that allowed by statute, they could spend the money on either advertising and promoting marriage, that marriage is something that's good to in a, like they literally put up billboards and, you know, poor neighborhoods saying, you know, brought on marriage.

And none of us thought that would work the entire, you know, kind of dismiss that out of hand.

But then the research that showed that, so then the other one was to build these skills.

And so there were three big studies that were done, huge studies.

Two of them had like I think seven and nine sites in different cities.

One, you know, one was like 5,500 person study of couples who are not married and it was randomly assign, may they got the intervention to improve their relationship, or they got, they were in a control group.

And another one just like that one, another 5,500 people, but they were married, and basically in the unmarried one it was no effects across the board.

There was one side where the positive effects on one side where that negative effects.

And then the ones that were married, there were like minuscule positive effects in a couple of the sites, in a few of the sites.

And, but I mean, just like, you know, if a typical, for those who no real effect sizes, you have a small effect would be a D of, you know, 0.3.

These were Ds of 0.03.

So they were really tiny, but because they had so many subjects, they were significant.

And then they did, finally, they did a huge, massive study with like 100,000 folks where they'd compared, they flooded entire metropolitan markets and every church basement they were running one of these programs.

And then they compared that city to a similar city.

So like the had Dallas Fort Worth, and then Kansas City, St. Louis, and there was one other one, and there were not only no effects there but it actually looked like people who were in the cities, where they flooded them, some of the people reported they were less safe in their relationships.

So there's real problems that need to be addressed in these monsters.

And to their, you know, the federal government to their credit, they ran these studies and they, but they kind of ignored it once the data came out.

And I should say, there are a lot of natural experiments that show that if you, if you, you know, and again, this legislation was the idea was lift people out of poverty by having them get married.

If you really want to do that, you know, what seems very clear is if you give mothers who are at or near the poverty line money, they spend it on their kids and that helps lift them out of poverty.

So it, you know, this is not, hasn't been popular for a while, but it sounds like it's getting more popular in Washington now, but cash is the way to lift people out of poverty and improve their marriages.

- And we have had a couple people who want to know, if you could send your list of rom-coms, please.

- I will.

I'll, yes, I'll- - Even if you can share that with me I can email that out to everybody.

- Okay, I'll just, I'll shoot you the link.

Yeah, I'll if I can pull it up super fast I'll put it in the chat.

- Okay, well, while you're doing that, I'm gonna go ahead and grab hold of the screen.

Wonderful questions.

Thank you everybody for keeping our chat busy, appreciate that.

And thank you, Dr. Matthew Johnson, this was a fascinating talk and very timely in for Valentine's Day.

If you enjoyed yourself, we encourage you to sign up for next month Science Pub, it's on March 9th at 7:00 PM and it is Seepex Cates success examining the DNA of a champion featuring Kate DeRosa from Binghamton University.

And that's March 9th at 7:00 PM.

And Kristine has popped that link into the chat so that you can open that up and get registered for next month Science Pub right away.

Again, I wanna thank Dr. Matthew Johnson for your time and your expertise.

It was a fascinating talk.

We had some really great questions come from our audience that was all over the country in the world.

I'd like to thank Kristine Kieswer for monitoring our chat, Julia Diana, for all your help with tweeting WSKG Public Media and I wanna thank you for attending tonight's Science Pub.

If you're enjoying yourself, please be sure to like our Facebook page for future event dates and updates.

We are @sciencepubbing and you can also find us at WSKG.

And thank you so much for joining us And I hope that you have a great evening.

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