哈哈，太喜歡這項實驗了，所以親自把它翻成中文。也順便給自己一個警惕，不要作隻劍齒虎:
研究人員高特曼和列文森把新婚夫婦帶入實驗室，看著他們互相交流，並要求夫婦談論他們的關係，像他們如何相遇，他們一同面對的一件重大衝突，以及一件正面的回憶。當他們說話的時候，測量器量出他們的血液流動，心臟速率，以及他們產生的的汗水。六年後，研究人員在做一次更進，看看夫婦們是否還在一起。
從他們收集的數據，高特曼把這幾對夫妻們歸納為兩大類:「大師」與「難民」。大師們六年後仍然快樂地在一起。難民們要不是已離婚就是長期處於不快樂的婚姻。
難民們在實驗時表現出亢奮的生理反應，處於「戰或逃」的模式，好像身旁有一隻劍齒虎。甚至當他們在談論他們的關係的愉快事或世俗層面，他們是準備攻擊和被攻擊。這使他們的心臟率飆升，對彼此有更加的侵略性。
大師們，相比之下，沒有這種亢奮的生理反應。他們感到平靜並有連結感，從而轉化為溫暖和深情的行為，甚至連吵架時也仍舊是這樣。這不是因為大師的生理結構較好，而是他們懂得如何創造信任和親密感，使得他們兩人在情緒上與生理上都處於舒適狀態。
研究人員發現「鄙視」是破壞關係的頭號因素。只專注於挑剔的人會錯過配偶50%的優點，而且還會看到一些根本就不存在的消極面。
「慈愛」使夫妻像膠水般的黏在一起。慈愛（以及情緒穩定性）是婚姻的滿意度及穩定性最重要的預測指標。
我們可以用兩種方式來思考慈愛。你可以把它當作一個固定的特質:你有，或者是沒有。你也可以把它想成是一塊肌肉。有些人，這塊肌肉自然就比別人發達，但每個人都可以透過運動使它變得更加強大。大師們傾向於把慈愛想成是一塊肌肉。他們知道，他們必須運用它來保持它的形狀。換句話說，他們知道一個良好的關係需要持續的努力。
高特曼解釋說:「如果你的伴侶表達他的需要時，你剛好累了、壓力大、或心煩意亂，寬容慈愛的人此時依舊顧慮伴侶的需要。」
這種時刻，比較輕鬆的應對方式可能是轉離你的伴侶，專注於你的iPad或你的書或電視，咕噥「嗯哼」，讓生活繼續前進。當你忽略了情感聯繫的小時光時，這會慢慢的磨損你們的關係。忽視會增加距離並使被忽略的一方心中產生怨恨。
吵架時最難實踐寬容慈愛，但這也是我們最需要展現寬容慈愛的時刻。如果我們在衝突中失控，放縱的鄙視或侵略我們的伴侶，這會在關係上造成不可挽救的損害。
高特曼解釋說:「慈愛並不意味著我們不可表達我們的憤怒，慈愛會告訴我們該採取什麼方式來表達憤怒。你可以向你的伴侶扔矛。或者你可以溝通解釋為什麼你感到受傷或憤怒，這是較好的路徑。」
另外，我覺得，有些人，不管你做什麼，都看不順眼、挑剔你、反駁你、只記得你負面的。劍齒虎心態的人，如果真的結婚生小孩，帶出來的下一代，要不是患上憂慮症，就是為了維護自己的精神狀態而逃得遠遠的，然後又被罵成是不孝子不孝女的。
以下關點蠻有趣，可促進思考:
http://lovecollege54.pixnet.net/blog/post/265956806
大部分的人把愛的問題認為主要是被愛的問題，而沒有想到去愛的問題，更沒想到自己是否有愛人的能力。
因此，愛的問題對人們來說，是如何被愛，如何變得可愛。
男人，試著變得成功，變得有權勢，有錢財，不斷的在生命中可能的範圍裡，不斷往上爬。
因為，男人常常把得不到愛情的原因歸咎於"自己不夠成功"。
這是男人典型的認為愛情問題是在如何被愛的經典例子。
但，愛，真的那麼簡單嗎？
女人，不斷的使自己充滿吸引力，採用的方法是竭盡可能的打扮保養自己，透過打造、鍛鍊，甚至是整型來讓自己的身材更為完美，然後考究衣裝，使自己越來越接近時尚。
看看那些能引起廣大女性共鳴的廣告便可知，如，一對男女分手一陣子的廣告，在多年之後，男主角遇到外型蛻變的女主角，他甚至差點認不出來，目瞪口呆，甚至連身旁的新歡叫喚，都無法回神......。
這是女人典型的認為愛情問題是在如何被愛的經典例子，只要有外在的魅力，幾乎就解決了戀愛問題。
但，愛，真的那麼簡單嗎？
另外，在讓自己被愛的問題上，男女會培養愉快的風度，有趣的談吐，能夠助人，客氣，不惹人生厭等。
許多使自己可愛的方式，同用之於使自己成功的方式，這兩者是相同的；就是要『贏得朋友及影響其他人。』
也因此，人們所謂的可愛，本質上只是『通俗』與『性感』的混合物，因為這樣才會被愛。
但，愛，真的那麼簡單嗎？
現在坊間的愛情學問，已經嚴然成為一門顯學。
只是絕大部分的人都在思考著如何被人愛上，也都在訓練如何讓自己被人愛上......。
被愛不等於完整的愛。
如果分不清楚愛的本質，即使成為了一個被全天下愛的人，也將不了解什麼是愛，更無法敞開心胸的去愛一個人。
實驗原文:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/happily-ever-after/372573/
Every day in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, about 13,000 American couples will say “I do,” committing to a lifelong relationship that will be full of friendship, joy, and love that will carry them forward to their final days on this earth.
Except, of course, it doesn’t work out that way for most people. The majority of marriages fail, either ending in divorce and separation or devolving into bitterness and dysfunction. Of all the people who get married, only three in ten remain in healthy, happy marriages, as psychologist Ty Tashiro points out in his book The Science of Happily Ever After, which was published earlier this year.
Social scientists first started studying marriages by observing them in action in the 1970s in response to a crisis: Married couples were divorcing at unprecedented rates. Worried about the impact these divorces would have on the children of the broken marriages, psychologists decided to cast their scientific net on couples, bringing them into the lab to observe them and determine what the ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship were. Was each unhappy family unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy claimed, or did the miserable marriages all share something toxic in common?
"Disaster" couples showed signs of being in fight-or-flight mode in their relationships. Having a conversation sitting next to their spouse was, to their bodies, like facing off with a saber-toothed tiger.
Psychologist John Gottman was one of those researchers. For the past four decades, he has studied thousands of couples in a quest to figure out what makes relationships work. I recently had the chance to interview Gottman and his wife Julie, also a psychologist, in New York City. Together, the renowned experts on marital stability run The Gottman Institute, which is devoted to helping couples build and maintain loving, healthy relationships based on scientific studies.
John Gottman began gathering his most critical findings in 1986, when he set up “The Love Lab” with his colleague Robert Levenson at the University of Washington. Gottman and Levenson brought newlyweds into the lab and watched them interact with each other. With a team of researchers, they hooked the couples up to electrodes and asked the couples to speak about their relationship, like how they met, a major conflict they were facing together, and a positive memory they had. As they spoke, the electrodes measured the subjects' blood flow, heart rates, and how much they sweat they produced. Then the researchers sent the couples home and followed up with them six years later to see if they were still together.
From the data they gathered, Gottman separated the couples into two major groups: the masters and the disasters. The masters were still happily together after six years. The disasters had either broken up or were chronically unhappy in their marriages. When the researchers analyzed the data they gathered on the couples, they saw clear differences between the masters and disasters. The disasters looked calm during the interviews, but their physiology, measured by the electrodes, told a different story. Their heart rates were quick, their sweat glands were active, and their blood flow was fast. Following thousands of couples longitudinally, Gottman found that the more physiologically active the couples were in the lab, the quicker their relationships deteriorated over time.
But what does physiology have to do with anything? The problem was that the disasters showed all the signs of arousal—of being in fight-or-flight mode—in their relationships. Having a conversation sitting next to their spouse was, to their bodies, like facing off with a saber-toothed tiger. Even when they were talking about pleasant or mundane facets of their relationships, they were prepared to attack and be attacked. This sent their heart rates soaring and made them more aggressive toward each other. For example, each member of a couple could be talking about how their days had gone, and a highly aroused husband might say to his wife, “Why don’t you start talking about your day. It won’t take you very long.”
The masters, by contrast, showed low physiological arousal. They felt calm and connected together, which translated into warm and affectionate behavior, even when they fought. It’s not that the masters had, by default, a better physiological make-up than the disasters; it’s that masters had created a climate of trust and intimacy that made both of them more emotionally and thus physically comfortable.
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Gottman wanted to know more about how the masters created that culture of love and intimacy, and how the disasters squashed it. In a follow-up study in 1990, he designed a lab on the University of Washington campus to look like a beautiful bed and breakfast retreat. He invited 130 newlywed couples to spend the day at this retreat and watched them as they did what couples normally do on vacation: cook, clean, listen to music, eat, chat, and hang out. And Gottman made a critical discovery in this study—one that gets at the heart of why some relationships thrive while others languish.
Throughout the day, partners would make requests for connection, what Gottman calls “bids.” For example, say that the husband is a bird enthusiast and notices a goldfinch fly across the yard. He might say to his wife, “Look at that beautiful bird outside!” He’s not just commenting on the bird here: he’s requesting a response from his wife—a sign of interest or support—hoping they’ll connect, however momentarily, over the bird.
The wife now has a choice. She can respond by either “turning toward” or “turning away” from her husband, as Gottman puts it. Though the bird-bid might seem minor and silly, it can actually reveal a lot about the health of the relationship. The husband thought the bird was important enough to bring it up in conversation and the question is whether his wife recognizes and respects that.
People who turned toward their partners in the study responded by engaging the bidder, showing interest and support in the bid. Those who didn’t—those who turned away—would not respond or respond minimally and continue doing whatever they were doing, like watching TV or reading the paper. Sometimes they would respond with overt hostility, saying something like, “Stop interrupting me, I’m reading.”
These bidding interactions had profound effects on marital well-being. Couples who had divorced after a six-year follow up had “turn-toward bids” 33 percent of the time. Only three in ten of their bids for emotional connection were met with intimacy. The couples who were still together after six years had “turn-toward bids” 87 percent of the time. Nine times out of ten, they were meeting their partner’s emotional needs.
* * *
By observing these types of interactions, Gottman can predict with up to 94 percent certainty whether couples—straight or gay, rich or poor, childless or not—will be broken up, together and unhappy, or together and happy several years later. Much of it comes down to the spirit couples bring to the relationship. Do they bring kindness and generosity; or contempt, criticism, and hostility?
“There’s a habit of mind that the masters have,” Gottman explained in an interview, “which is this: they are scanning social environment for things they can appreciate and say thank you for. They are building this culture of respect and appreciation very purposefully. Disasters are scanning the social environment for partners’ mistakes.”
Contempt is the number one factor that tears couples apart.
“It’s not just scanning environment,” chimed in Julie Gottman. “It’s scanning the partner for what the partner is doing right or scanning him for what he’s doing wrong and criticizing versus respecting him and expressing appreciation.”
Contempt, they have found, is the number one factor that tears couples apart. People who are focused on criticizing their partners miss a whopping 50 percent of positive things their partners are doing and they see negativity when it’s not there. People who give their partner the cold shoulder—deliberately ignoring the partner or responding minimally—damage the relationship by making their partner feel worthless and invisible, as if they’re not there, not valued. And people who treat their partners with contempt and criticize them not only kill the love in the relationship, but they also kill their partner's ability to fight off viruses and cancers. Being mean is the death knell of relationships.
Kindness, on the other hand, glues couples together. Research independent from theirs has shown that kindness (along with emotional stability) is the most important predictor of satisfaction and stability in a marriage. Kindness makes each partner feel cared for, understood, and validated—feel loved. “My bounty is as boundless as the sea,” says Shakespeare’s Juliet. “My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite.” That’s how kindness works too: there’s a great deal of evidence showing the more someone receives or witnesses kindness, the more they will be kind themselves, which leads to upward spirals of love and generosity in a relationship.
There are two ways to think about kindness. You can think about it as a fixed trait: either you have it or you don’t. Or you could think of kindness as a muscle. In some people, that muscle is naturally stronger than in others, but it can grow stronger in everyone with exercise. Masters tend to think about kindness as a muscle. They know that they have to exercise it to keep it in shape. They know, in other words, that a good relationship requires sustained hard work.
“If your partner expresses a need,” explained Julie Gottman, “and you are tired, stressed, or distracted, then the generous spirit comes in when a partner makes a bid, and you still turn toward your partner.”
In that moment, the easy response may be to turn away from your partner and focus on your iPad or your book or the television, to mumble “Uh huh” and move on with your life, but neglecting small moments of emotional connection will slowly wear away at your relationship. Neglect creates distance between partners and breeds resentment in the one who is being ignored.
The hardest time to practice kindness is, of course, during a fight—but this is also the most important time to be kind. Letting contempt and aggression spiral out of control during a conflict can inflict irrevocable damage on a relationship.
“Kindness doesn’t mean that we don’t express our anger,” Julie Gottman explained, “but the kindness informs how we choose to express the anger. You can throw spears at your partner. Or you can explain why you’re hurt and angry, and that’s the kinder path.”
John Gottman elaborated on those spears: “Disasters will say things differently in a fight. Disasters will say ‘You’re late. What’s wrong with you? You’re just like your mom.’ Masters will say ‘I feel bad for picking on you about your lateness, and I know it’s not your fault, but it’s really annoying that you’re late again.’”
* * *
For the hundreds of thousands of couples getting married this month—and for the millions of couples currently together, married or not—the lesson from the research is clear: If you want to have a stable, healthy relationship, exercise kindness early and often.
"A lot of times, a partner is trying to do the right thing even if it's executed poorly. So appreciate the intent."
When people think about practicing kindness, they often think about small acts of generosity, like buying each other little gifts or giving one another back rubs every now and then. While those are great examples of generosity, kindness can also be built into the very backbone of a relationship through the way partners interact with each other on a day-to-day basis, whether or not there are back rubs and chocolates involved.
One way to practice kindness is by being generous about your partner’s intentions. From the research of the Gottmans, we know that disasters see negativity in their relationship even when it is not there. An angry wife may assume, for example, that when her husband left the toilet seat up, he was deliberately trying to annoy her. But he may have just absent-mindedly forgotten to put the seat down.
Or say a wife is running late to dinner (again), and the husband assumes that she doesn’t value him enough to show up to their date on time after he took the trouble to make a reservation and leave work early so that they could spend a romantic evening together. But it turns out that the wife was running late because she stopped by a store to pick him up a gift for their special night out. Imagine her joining him for dinner, excited to deliver her gift, only to realize that he’s in a sour mood because he misinterpreted what was motivating her behavior. The ability to interpret your partner’s actions and intentions charitably can soften the sharp edge of conflict.
“Even in relationships where people are frustrated, it’s almost always the case that there are positive things going on and people trying to do the right thing,” psychologist Ty Tashiro told me. “A lot of times, a partner is trying to do the right thing even if it’s executed poorly. So appreciate the intent.”
Another powerful kindness strategy revolves around shared joy. One of the telltale signs of the disaster couples Gottman studied was their inability to connect over each other’s good news. When one person in the relationship shared the good news of, say, a promotion at work with excitement, the other would respond with wooden disinterest by checking his watch or shutting the conversation down with a comment like, “That’s nice.”
We’ve all heard that partners should be there for each other when the going gets rough. But research shows that being there for each other when things go right is actually more important for relationship quality. How someone responds to a partner’s good news can have dramatic consequences for the relationship.
In one study from 2006, psychological researcher Shelly Gable and her colleagues brought young adult couples into the lab to discuss recent positive events from their lives. They psychologists wanted to know how partners would respond to each other’s good news. They found that, in general, couples responded to each other’s good news in four different ways that they called: passive destructive, active destructive, passive constructive, and active constructive.
Let’s say that one partner had recently received the excellent news that she got into medical school. She would say something like “I got into my top choice med school!”
Those who showed genuine interest in their partner's joys were more likely to be together.
If her partner responded in a passive destructive manner, he would ignore the event. For example, he might say something like: “You wouldn’t believe the great news I got yesterday! I won a free t-shirt!”
If her partner responded in a passive constructive way, he would acknowledge the good news, but in a half-hearted, understated way. A typical passive constructive response is saying “That’s great, babe” as he texts his buddy on his phone.
In the third kind of response, active destructive, the partner would diminish the good news his partner just got: “Are you sure you can handle all the studying? And what about the cost? Med school is so expensive!”
Finally, there’s active constructive responding. If her partner responded in this way, he stopped what he was doing and engaged wholeheartedly with her: “That’s great! Congratulations! When did you find out? Did they call you? What classes will you take first semester?”
Among the four response styles, active constructive responding is the kindest. While the other response styles are joy-killers, active constructive responding allows the partner to savor her joy and gives the couple an opportunity to bond over the good news. In the parlance of the Gottmans, active constructive responding is a way of “turning toward” your partners bid (sharing the good news) rather than “turning away” from it.
Active constructive responding is critical for healthy relationships. In the 2006 study, Gable and her colleagues followed up with the couples two months later to see if they were still together. The psychologists found that the only difference between the couples who were together and those who broke up was active constructive responding. Those who showed genuine interest in their partner’s joys were more likely to be together. In an earlier study, Gable found that active constructive responding was also associated with higher relationship quality and more intimacy between partners.
There are many reasons why relationships fail, but if you look at what drives the deterioration of many relationships, it’s often a breakdown of kindness. As the normal stresses of a life together pile up—with children, career, friend, in-laws, and other distractions crowding out the time for romance and intimacy—couples may put less effort into their relationship and let the petty grievances they hold against one another tear them apart. In most marriages, levels of satisfaction drop dramatically within the first few years together. But among couples who not only endure, but live happily together for years and years, the spirit of kindness and generosity guides them forward.
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