The beginnings of your relationship are quite conflicting? Rest assured, the friction should fade over the years. This is in any case what emerges from a study by the University of Berkeley in California (United States). The authors explain in Emotion magazine that the tensions and negative criticisms of the first years of life as a couple tend to calm down over the years for more positive relationships. In aging couples, humor, tenderness and mutual acceptance take precedence over negative behaviors such as defensiveness and criticism.
These findings challenge long-held theories that couple emotions deteriorate with age. Conversely, they rather suggest “an emotionally positive trajectory for long-term married couples”, specifies University of Berkeley website.
For their study, the psychologists observed over 25 years more than 150 long-term marriages. Most study participants today are in their 70s and 80s. Along the experiment were analyzed 15-minute interactions between spouses in a laboratory. During this time, the partners discussed their shared experiences and their possible conflicts and disagreements within the couple. Thus during all these years, the experiment was repeated in order to evaluate the emotional changes within the couple.
As a result, the researchers found that middle-aged and older couples, regardless of relationship satisfaction, adopted more positive behaviors with age, while negative behaviors decreased.
The positive impact of marriage on mental health
“These results provide behavioral evidence […] that as we age, we focus more on the positive aspects of our lives,” Verstaen sums up.
Another finding was that wives were more emotionally expressive than their husbands and tended to adopt a more controlling and less affectionate behavior with age. But generally, across all age and sex cohorts in the study, negative behaviors declined with age.
For the researchers, findings suggest the positive impact of marriageon the elderly.
“Our results have shed light on one of the great paradoxes of the end of life”, points out Robert Levenson, professor of psychology at the University of Berkeley, lead author of the study published in Emotion. “Despite the loss of friends and family members, older people [qui vivent] stable marriage are relatively happy and experience low rates of depression and D’anxiety. Marriage has been good for their mental health.”
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