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The Death of Relationships
A lot of us get into relationships that don’t last — friendship, love, marriage, business — and wonder why they break up. The study of body language, with a focus on facial expressions, can help explain relationship breakdowns.
A psychology researcher named Paul Ekman published a study in 1972 which identified six basic emotions which all human beings share: fear, anger, surprise, happiness, sadness, and disgust. Later, he added one more: contempt, which is a mixture of anger and disgust.
In the 1980s and ’90s, another psychologist, John Gottman, studied what makes marriages work or end in divorce. (Today, when I refer to “marriage,” I mean both the formal, ceremonial kind as well as the one where a couple lives in a sustained, monogamous relationship.) Dr. Gottman created the “Love Lab,” and spent thousands of hours listening to couples talking and interacting with one another.
Dr. Gottman found that contempt was listed as one of the four destructive behaviors that can destroy a relationship, along with defensiveness, silent treatment, and criticism. However, Gottman concluded that contempt was the worst of all. It was, he found from all his studies, the number one predictor that a relationship was heading for divorce.
While contempt is an emotion, it also manifests itself in a facial expression, e.g., an asymmetrical…
