Newlyweds know on a subconscious level whether their marriage will result in wedded bliss or an unhappy relationship, a new study has found.
Researchers from the Florida State University studied 135 heterosexual couples who had been married for less than six months and then followed up with them every six months over a four-year period.
"Although they may be largely unwilling or unable to verbalise them, people's automatic evaluations of their partners predict one of the most important outcomes of their lives - the trajectory of their marital satisfaction," the researchers said.
The study found people's conscious attitudes, or how they said they felt, did not always reflect their gut-level or automatic feelings about their marriage.
It was the gut-level feelings, not their conscious ones, that actually predicted how happy they remained over time.
To conduct the experiment, the researchers asked the individuals to report their relationship satisfaction and the severity of their specific relationship problems.
The participants also were asked to provide their conscious evaluations by describing their marriage according to 15 pairs of opposing adjectives, such as "good" or "bad," "satisfied" or "unsatisfied."
Another experiment involved flashing a photo of the study participant's spouse on a computer screen for just one-third of a second followed by a positive word like "awesome" or "terrific" or a negative word like "awful" or "terrible."
The individuals simply had to press a key on the keyboard to indicate whether the word was positive or negative.
"People who have really positive feelings about their partners are very quick to indicate that words like 'awesome' are positive words and very slow to indicate that words like 'awful' are negative words," said associate Professor of Psychology James K McNulty.
People with positive gut-level attitudes were really good at processing positive words but bad at processing negative words when those automatic attitudes were activated.
The opposite was also true. When a spouse had negative feelings about their partner that were activated by the brief exposure to the photo, they had a harder time switching gears to process the positive words, McNulty explained.
The researchers found that the respondents who unwittingly revealed negative or lukewarm attitudes during the implicit measure reported the most marital dissatisfaction four years later.
"I think the findings suggest that people may want to attend a little bit to their gut," McNulty said.
"If they can sense that their gut is telling them that there is a problem, then they might benefit from exploring that, maybe even with a professional marriage counsellor," he said.
The study was published in the journal Science.
