Principia Amoris

The New Science of Love

John Mordechai Gottman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136175657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Interpersonal Relations in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Stereotypically, science and emotion are diametric opposites: one is cold and unfeeling, the other soft and nebulous; one is based on proven facts while the other is based on inexplicable feelings and "never the twain shall meet, " until now.John Gottman delves into the unquantifiable realm of love, armed with science and logic, and emerges with the knowledge that relationships can be not only understood, but also predicted as well. Based on research done at his Love Lab and other laboratories, Gottman has discovered that the future of love relationships can be predicted with a startling 91% success rate. These predictions can help couples to prevent disasters in their relationships, recognize the signs of a promising relationship, and perhaps more importantly, recognize the signs of a doomed one. Principia Amoris also introduces Love Equations, a mathematical modeling of relationships that helps understand predictions. Love Equations are powerful tools that can prevent relationship distress and heal ailing relationships. Readers learn about the various research and studies that were done to discover the science behind love, and are treated to a history of the people, ideas, and events that shaped our current understanding. They also learn about:
• The "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"
• 45 natural principles of love
• 5 couple types
• 5 recipes for good relationships
• And much more!Just as science helped us to understand the physical world, it is helping us to understand the emotional world as well. Using the insights in this book, mental health professionals can meaningfully help their distressed clients, as well as better understand why a relationship is failing or succeeding. Appropriate for the curious non-mental health professional as well, Principia Amoris is a must-have on any bookshelf!

CHAPTER 1

A Science of Love? Really?

Omne ignotum pro magnifico
(“Everything unknown passes for something splendid”)
—Tacitus, 98 AD

Can we really build a science of love? Is love something that we can actually examine under a psychological microscope? The early great psychologists of the 19th century brought to psychological questions methods of systematic, unbiased observation and measurement. These methods were developed by animal psychologists and behaviorists who focused exclusively on observing behavior.

These early scientists in the emerging field of psychology claimed that the first task of science was description and good measurement. Their advice: Observe, describe, measure, and find patterns that replicate over studies. Then try to discover the principles that organize these patterns. So, with that history of psychology as a legacy, we all began bringing love into a laboratory.

However, my life-long colleague Robert Levenson and I were not limited to studying just behavior. We also include self-reports of experience, and human physiology. But our first task was simply to describe. Then our second task was to find replicable patterns. The third task was prediction over time. The fourth task was to understand that prediction, and build a theory. The fifth task was to use that understanding to help couples have successful love relationships. The accomplishment of these five tasks took many scientists—not just our laboratory—over four decades. Now we can share this good news with the world. What were the beginnings of this field of understanding love? It all began when two scientists recorded the conversations of one newlywed couple on their honeymoon.

RECORDING A COUPLE’S HONEYMOON

In the 1960s, two researchers, William Soskin and Vera John, inadvertently started a revolution in our ability to study love. They recorded one couple on their honeymoon. The couple had to wear huge expensive backpacks even when rowing on a lake to record their conversations. The backpack contained a radio transmitter that sent a signal of their conversation back to a control room so that all their conversation was recorded on audio tape.

Then Soskin and John transcribed every word the couple said to one another, and categorized every sentence, a process they called “coding,” using a complex category system. Here’s a clip of Roz and Jock’s conversation as they row on a lake resort:

Jock:	Come on! Yo ho, heave ho. You do the rowing.
Roz:	Nuts to that idea. You’re the big, strong man. Mmmmm.
Jock:	Yeah, but I have a handicap.
Roz:	Yeah, you have a handicap in your head.
Jock:	(to attendant) Can we take out a boat? (They get a boat.)
Roz:	Whoops! Don’t get wet. You row for a while and then I’ll row. Okay?
Jock:	All right. It’s awkward rowing with the transmitter on.
Roz:	Go on. Want me to take it while you’re rowing?
Jock:	No, it’s okay.
Roz:	Bet you don’t know how to.
Jock:	Oh, yes I do. I guess I just …
Roz:	Here, let me change.
Jock:	I’ll just have to set this thing out here.
Roz:	Let me take it.
Jock:	Okay. It’s really a clear lake, isn’t it?
Roz:	It’s wonderful. Look, there’s a big moth. I wish I had my book with me, then I could tell what kind it was.
Jock:	(handing off the transmitter) Here, put it on.
Roz:	Like this? I wouldn’t want my speech distorted, since I usually have so much to say.
Jock:	Aren’t those cabins nice?
Roz:	Yes, those are the ones we were supposed to be in. I keep telling you.
Jock:	These there? Look how dark the water is down there.
Roz:	You tip this boat over with me in it and I’ll be very upset. Uh, uh, huh, huh, huh, huh (chuckling).
Jock:	I just felt the …
Roz:	(laughing) Jock, I just made a joke. Have you no sense of humor?
Jock:	Look how …
Roz:	Why are we going way out in the middle? I’ll get sunburned.
Jock:	What difference does it make whether you’re in the middle or not?
Roz:	You get more reflection in the middle.
Jock:	(scoffs) Oh!
Roz:	Jock, I know!
Jock:	How do you know?
Roz:	I can see! You put on your sun specks before you get a headache, huh?
Jock:	No.
Roz:	No? Okay. Wanna take your shoes off?
Jock:	No.
Roz:	(taunting in a sing song way) … Ah, Jock’s gonna be sore tomorrow because he insists on showing off. (Jock rocks the boat intentionally.) No! Now cut that out! You’ll ruin this $50,000 equipment.
Jock:	Oh, look. Boy these are nice oars.
Roz:	You’re a good rower, honey.

Soskin and John asked themselves, “How does one scientifically ‘analyze’ these naturally-occurring conversations of these two people?” As a response, Soskin and John created a very complex set of categories (called a “coding system”) for every one of Roz and Jock’s utterances. It took an enormous amount of time to categorize these utterances, and then to search for patterns in their data.

After all that “coding” work, they were mightily disappointed in the results of their analysis. They felt that these analyses totally failed to capture the complexity of this couple’s relationship, that their coding just didn’t capture the richness of the actual data. They concluded that the problem was that their categories for coding all this conversation by Roz and Jock had ignored both emotion and power. They felt that they really couldn’t capture the playful teasing and the challenging contempt that Roz and Jock displayed in this clip, the attempts at control by Roz, and Jock’s resistance to being controlled, nor their repair in the last two lines at the end of this clip. Soskin and John wisely concluded that future coding of naturalistic conversations that a couple has should include emotion and power. They were right about that. That, in fact, was where we started, trying to describe the emotions.

OBSERVING LOVE: NEW METHODS MATERIALIZED

Although sociologists had been studying marriages since the 1930s, the use of observational methods was what we psychologists initially brought to this field. These sociologists had succeeded in accomplishing the huge task of defining, and reliably and validly measuring, relationship happiness in married couples. That difficult task took from 1938 to the mid-1950s. The accomplishment was an enormous advantage for us psychologists, once we started studying relationships in the mid-1960s.

By the early 1970s, psychologists who did therapy with families entered the fray, searching for what to observe in couples. The new technology of portable videotape made this process much richer. The intuitions of clinical psychologists led to many of the new breakthroughs. The therapists who began doing therapy with families taught us to focus on communication, on messages received and sent in just one interaction, and on the couple as an interacting system.

The decade of the 1960s had witnessed an outpouring of new writing by social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists who were discovering new patterns in doing psychotherapy with couples and families. Instead of relying on narrative accounts of relationship events, they were observing these events in action.

Those insights were aided by breakthroughs in how to study nonverbal behavior, and emotion, particularly insights about the face that came from Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen at the University of California at San Francisco. Inspired by Sylvan Tomkins, they and Carroll Izard taught us how to study emotions in the human face, in both adults and children.

Ekman and Friesen picked up on Darwin’s 1872 study of emotions, and created a new coding system that precisely described the motions of over 46 facial “actions.” They showed us how to study facial movement anatomically, and how to interpret facial movements to understand the universality of human emotions everywhere on our planet. They reversed the initial misleading declaration in the 1950s by the famous cognitive scientist Jerome Bruner that the face was a researcher’s nightmare, and not worth studying. Instead of a nightmare, Ekman and Friesen showed that it was a goldmine.

Being able to code and interpret facial expressions was just one gateway toward understanding emotion. Knowing what else to code in couple’s interaction was a initially a huge challenge for the scientific study of couples, and it took scientists over 20 years to empirically learn what to observe in couples’ interactions. Once we knew how to code emotions in the face, in the voice, in the body, and in language, we were off and running. A new era began once sophisticated observational methods began to be devised by psychologists like Gerry Patterson and Robert Weiss. We couples researchers also learned a lot from the scientists, such as Harry Harlow and Jim Sackett at the University of Wisconsin, who studied non-human primates.

Once the initial huge problems of measurement were solved, new methods also had to be developed for analyzing this rich stream of observational data from two interacting people. This mathematics of the new field was christened “cybernetics.” It had been developed by M.I.T. mathematician Norbert Wiener during World War II. Wiener was part of a project to develop the new math as part of the task of designing an anti-aircraft gun that could anticipate and follow its target (instead of throwing up an array of flak, and hoping an airplane bumped into it). The new math all had to do with observing events unfold over time, a field christened “time-series analysis.” A “time-series” is a graphical plot of a variable over time. Just as the Dow Jones industrial average tracked the stock market, we could track a conversation between two people using two Dow Jones graphs of a conversation. Every morning daily newspaper had examples of these stock market time-series graphs.

With time-series analysis, we could search for rhythmic patterns during conflict. French mathematician Jean Baptiste Fourier had proved an amazing theorem in 1822 that helped us see the wave nature of patterns that repeated over time. Using the new methods of time-series analysis, we could now quantitatively assess how interconnected two people were. We could even assess the connection between two people’s hearts. Statistician James Ringland and I worked out a statistical test for making causal inferences in two time-series, one for each partner. Using time-series methods that Gene Glass and Victor Wilson and I developed in 1973, we could also assess whether specific events preceded significant changes in a time series. Therefore, by the early 1980s a whole new technology for analyzing time-series patterns could be brought to bear on this task of bringing love into a laboratory and watching lovers interact.

But, what if the sequence of data was just a series of categories, like “Roz-angry” followed by “Jock-angry,” rather than continuous numbers as in the Dow Jones average? How would these data get analyzed?

The answer lay in Claude Shannon’s information theory, developed in a small monograph published in 1949. Shannon was actually a student of Norbert Wiener. The vague concept of “information” was now defined precisely in terms of the statistical reduction of uncertainty. It took 25 years for Shannon’s information theory to be applied to the study of couples’ interaction. A brilliant clinician and scientist named Harold Raush applied the new mathematical “information theory” techniques Shannon had devised during World War II. Raush conducted a groundbreaking longitudinal study at the National Institute of Mental Health of couples having their first baby.

Finally, because of Raush’s pioneering study, our analytic techniques could match the subtlety that Soskin and John could not capture in Jock and Roz’s honeymoon talk. Now, instead of merely tallying how often some observational category each partner occurred in the interaction, we could (for example) describe how Roz tended to react when Jock challenged her knowledge. We could describe these probabilistic sequences in transitional probabilities. That means that we are not saying that that Roz would respond to Jock that way every time, but just more likely than chance alone would predict. We talk about reducing uncertainty in what Roz might do next by knowing what Jock had just done. If our prediction of Roz’s doing behavior Y, once Jock had just done behavior X, was significantly better than her overall probability of doing behavior Y, then that’s all we needed to determine to get the probabilistic sequence Jock X → Roz Y. This is what we need to do to detect statistical patterns of sequences in our data.

We could also build longer, and much more interesting, sequences. In information theory we now had our basic tools for describing what patterns of behavior were in Roz and Jock’s and other couples’ data. Statistical tests could then be devised to ferret out sequences in Jock and Roz’s codes. This idea of probabilistic sequential pattern was an enormous conceptual advance in understanding interactions between two people. And our field owed it all to that World War II project developing a more sophisticated gun. Now, with information theory and time-series analysis, we could detect complex sequences that actually captured the complexity of a couple’s interaction. We were off and running, with observational techniques and analytic tools to match the richness of what we were observing in our labs. If we found patterns that characterized unhappy marriages (a big “if”), and if we then found different sequences that characterized happy or stable marriages (another big “if”), then we could see if these results replicated, and if they did (another big “if”), then we could try to explain these patterns. We had the tools now. We just needed the data.

Yet, big problems emerged. The amount of data we generated in one study was simply overwhelming. For example, if we had only 40 codes for each partner’s behavior, in just two-step sequences we had 40 × 40 = 1,600 possible two-step patterns. In just three-step sequences we had 64,000 possible patterns! How could we ferret out the dance in which Roz and Jock were engage...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 A Science of Love? Really?
• 2 There Are Three Phases of Love in a Lifetime of Love
• 3 Imagining “The Love Equations“
• 4 Love and Equations Do Go Together
• 5 Our Final Love Equations
• 6 The Invisible Factors That Deeply Affect Love
• 7 There Are Only Three Ways to Love Well
• 8 Getting a Feeling for the Love Equation Parameters: Becoming a Better Observer of Couples’ Interaction
• 9 When to Bail Out of a Bad Relationship—With a Little Help From Algebra
• 10 As Good as It Gets
• 11 The Rest of Emotion
• 12 Emotional Turbulence
• 13 Five Recipes for a Delicious Relationship, and Proof That It Works
• Afterword
• Appendices 1–9
• Bibliography
• Index