Maintaining your composure while having a heated argument with your spouse might be a difficult one. However, a recent study that was published in the Emotion journals reveals that the couple can remain in a long-term marital relationship when the wives and not husbands know how to regulate their emotions.
However, the team of researchers from University of California-Berkeley and Northwestern University state that a husband must not ask his wife to remain calm during a quarrel. They also said that the marriages that had the wives who were able to maintain their composure faster at times of a disagreement had happy marital life, be it short or long term.
The researchers have recorded the interactions between 80 heterosexual couples which were mid-aged or elderly. They also focused on the way they had disagreements and how fast they made up from their arguments.
Robert Levenson, psychologist, UC Berkeley has been tracking heterosexual couples right from the year 1989 and keeps track of about 156 couples residing in Bay Area, San Francisco right now. The latest findings by him and his team showed that genetic variations have a great influence in marital satisfaction. He said that when wives discuss the issues and find solutions, it helps the married couple to cope up with the conflicts. But the sad part is, he said, that this method would not work for the husbands as wives would blame them for changing in to the problem solver mode much faster!
The lead author of the study, Lian Bloch, Assistant Professor, pacific Graduate School of Psychology, said that anger and contempt would be the threatening factors in the lives of the couple. However, the study they performed suggested that if the wives are able to maintain their calm during the arguments, their marriage would still thrive.
The co-author of the study, Claudia Hasse, Assistant professor, North Western University also added that the age factor also had a good influence on how the married couples communicated while having disagreements. The researchers tracked the response of the couples based on the body language, discussion topic, facial expressions and voice tone.
