The harbinger of an unhappy marriage might be your gut.

A new study by psychologists found that newlyweds had underlying positive or negative gut feelings about their spouses that many are unaware of and that predicted marital satisfaction years later.

The experiment used a photo of the newlywed spouse and a series of positive and negative words to elicit a so-called automatic attitude.

“Either people are completely unaware of this automatic attitude, or they’re completely aware and just not willing to talk about it,” said psychologist and study author James McNulty of Florida State University. The study was published online Thursday in the journal Science.

Automatic attitudes are unfiltered, knee-jerk reactions that can sometimes oppose the conscious thoughts.

McNulty, who primarily conducts research on romantic relationships, showed a newlywed the photo of his or her spouse for just a third of a second, followed by a word that was positive or negative: “delightful” or “disgusting,” for instance.

The newlywed, as fast as possible, had to push a button indicating the word was good or bad.

Psychologists say that witnessing the photo for just long enough to recognize who you’re looking at, but not enough to study the detail of the picture, causes your brain to automatically retrieve from memory any associations you have with it. This facilitates a speedier response to any words that match those associations.

So, for example, a newlywed who pushed the button for a negative word faster than for a positive word after the photo of the new spouse flashed by, was indicating an automatic attitude that was negative.

McNulty and his colleagues tested for automatic attitudes with 135 heterosexual couples that had been married in the previous six months. They filled out a questionnaire asking them about marital satisfaction. Unsurprisingly, the newlyweds’ marriage evaluations had a decidedly rosy outlook.

Then, at six-month intervals for the next four years, each partner re-evaluated their feelings about the marriage using the same questionnaire.

As time passed and their honeymoon phases waned, the initial automatic attitudes gradually started to match up with their reported happiness or unhappiness.

Twelve of the couples even divorced within the four years of the study, McNulty said.

McNulty said there is pressure for newlyweds to seem ecstatic: “They just got married, spent thousands of dollars on their wedding, and committed to one another in public. They better be happy!”

But since later they were able to admit their less than stellar opinions of the partnership, it suggests that certain people just might not realize their deep feelings. But there’s no fooling an automatic attitude test.

“People can’t fake it. They don’t even know what it’s measuring,” he said.

However, clinical psychologist Gregory Kulman of Brooklyn College believes the study needed to ask more specific questions in order to find a link between conscious and automatic attitudes.

 

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