Traditionally, red has been the colour of the rich and powerful. This is true around the world and cross-culturally.  Ancient Rome’s most powerful people were known as “the ones who wear red,” and we roll out the red carpet for today’s most high-profile events.

Along with this learned association between status and the colour red, researchers also look to the biological origins of human behaviour.  In non-human primates like mandrills and gelada baboons, red is a marker of male dominance and is expressed most strongly in alpha males.  Females of these species mate most often with these alpha males. 

“We say in our culture that men act like animals in the sexual realm.  It looks like women may be acting like animals in the same sort of way,” says the study’s lead author, Andrew Elliot.

To test this, Professor Elliot had 288 female and 25 male undergraduates look at photos of men in several different situations: in some, the male’s shirt was digitally coloured either red or another colour; in others, the photo’s frame was digitally altered to red or a different colour.  Compared to women who were shown other colours, women who saw either the red shirt or red frame said that the man appeared more powerful, attractive, and sexually desirable. However, it’s interesting to note that it did not make him seem more likeable, kind, or sociable. 

Participants of the study showed no awareness that Elliot’s research focused on the influence of colour.  These findings indicate that colour not only has aesthetic value but that it can affect our perception and behaviour in significant ways. 

Further Reading: 

University of Rochester (2010, August 3). Women attracted to men in red, research shows. ScienceDaily. Retrieved August 18, 2010

This is in sharp contrast to people who have low social interaction – those who live alone and have few robust external relationships–who face a much higher risk of death.

Low social interaction was found to be just as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic and is actually worse than not exercising or being obese, according to the study.

The researchers completed a meta-analysis, looking at 148 studies including over 300,000 participants on social relationships and health outcomes. They looked at both the functional types of support given, e.g. marital/living alone status, as well as social network size and level of engagement. The longevity boost held even after controlling for age, sex, initial health status, cause of death and the duration of the study itself. In fact, the estimate of 50 percent increased odds of a longer lifespan is conservative because relationship quality was unknown in many of the studies the researchers reviewed and could not be included in the meta-analysis. It is possible that the benefit of social engagement on an individual’s health is actually much higher.

While it’s unknown exactly how living a socially engaged life acts as such a protective barrier, it certainly adds to the growing research revealing the connection between psychological processes and physical health. On a practical level, friends, romantic partners and family can all help provide and support good health practices, as well as provide comfort, laughter and meaning in life.

This research is a persuasive example of why public health and medical professionals should take into account social relationships and well-being when evaluating an individual’s health. It suggests that interventions that address social engagement may influence more than just quality of life, but also survival.

Further Reading:
Holt-Lunstad J, Smith TB, Layton JB. Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review. PLoS Medicine, 2010; 7 (7): e1000316 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316

Brigham Young University (2010, July 27). Relationships improve your odds of survival by 50 percent, research finds. ScienceDaily. Retrieved July 28, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com¬ /releases/2010/07/100727174909.htm

The two studies consisted of 222 volunteers currently in a romantic relationship.  They were instructed to watch a monitor as three types of words were placed on a screen one at time: emotionally positive words (peace, accepting, sharing, etc), negative words (death, tragedy, attacking, etc), and partner-related words (names, traits).  In one study the test words were either positive or negative, while the second study had positive and negative relationship-specific words.  Participants either had to press the space bar whenever they saw either positive words or partner-related words, or when they saw negative words paired with words about their partner.   The goal was for the participants to react automatically, before conscious thought started regulating reactions.  If participants had good associations with their partners then they should have been able to do the positive pairing task more easily than the negative one.

Results from both tests confirmed the importance of negative implicit evaluations.  The researchers found that participants who had high associations with negative words AND low associations with positive words were more likely to break up within the year.  Not surprisingly, those that had positive partner evaluations were associated with a reduced risk of breakup.  This effect held after controlling for self-reported relationship satisfaction, conflict, and neuroticism.  This means the test was better at predicting participants’ emotions than their own self-reports! The earliest notions of relationship doubt might be outside of conscious awareness.

Further Reading:

Association for Psychological Science New Release

Lee S, Rogge RD, & Reis HT (2010). Assessing the seeds of relationship decay: Using implicit evaluations to detect the early stages of disillusionment. Psychological Science, 21 (6), 857-64.

Eight years ago, the US Administration on Children and Families launched the multimillion-dollar Building Strong Families (BSF) study to learn whether educational programs could strengthen the relationships of unmarried parents in low-income communities.  The largest experimental study of couples ever conducted, the BSF project involved 5103 unmarried expectant or new parent couples recruited from eight sites around the United States.  Half of these couples were offered classes on effective communication, problem solving, and parenting skills, while the other half were randomly assigned to a control group.

The first results from the BSF project were released in late May.  Fifteen months into the study, there were virtually no measurable differences between couples in the treatment and control groups.  Offering couples training in relationship and parenting skills had no discernable effects on how they communicated, their ability to manage disagreements, their rates of intimate partner violence, their ability to parent together, or the involvement of fathers in the lives of their children.  Moreover, the programs did not affect whether couples stayed together, lived together, or married.  One effect that did emerge:  African American couples who were offered the classes were more satisfied with their relationships than those who were not.  But this effect was small, it did not translate into higher marriage rates, and African American couples in the program group were still less happy 15 months later than all other couples assigned to the control group.

Some will be surprised to learn that offering education in relationship skills and parenting to low-income couples does not actually change their relationships or parenting.  Nevertheless, the results of this important project deserve close analysis, as they contain crucial lessons for future efforts aimed at improving the lives of families in low-income communities.

One lesson is that offering classes to couples provides no guarantee that couples will participate in them.  The BSF programs were intensive, requiring 30 to 42 hours of group meetings.  Across the eight sites, 45% of all couples assigned to receive instruction never attended any of these meetings.  In fact, only 17% of the program couples received at least 80% of the classes required by the program.  It may be that couples assigned to the program group were simply unable to find the hours required.  Lower-income couples generally have more demands on their time, and less flexible time, than higher-income couples, and the arrival of a baby adds to these challenges.  Asking couples who are already spread thin to take on new tasks, even to improve their relationships and parenting, may be unreasonable.  Ironically, the couples least likely to receive the classes were those whose relationships are known to be most vulnerable:  those who were not married or cohabiting, had less than a high school education, or were African American.

The BSF findings also call into question the basic idea that relationship skills training is a viable route for improving intimate relationships.  Emerging evidence suggests that the quality of couples’ intimate relationships is powerfully constrained by the environments in which couples live.  For example, even middle-class couples who are perfectly capable of effective communication when times are good lose that ability during periods of stress.  The way couples relate to each other may be less a skill that can be taught than a capacity that can be fostered or hindered by the circumstances that couples face.  Programs that emphasize relationship skill training are likely to be underestimating the power of these circumstances in the lives of couples, a glaring omission when aiming to improve the lives of children born to disadvantaged parents.

The intent behind BSF was right, but the interventions failed to produce the desired outcomes.  Alternative approaches to building strong families might devote the same resources toward improving living conditions in lower-income communities.  Whatever enables low-income families to manage their lives better should make it easier for them to manage their relationships as well.  With greater support, couples who are motivated to be together may find ways to do so, even in the absence of programs that target their relationships directly.

Further Reading:

Wood, R.G., McConnell, S., Moore, Q., & Hsueh, J. (2010). Strenghtening unmarried parents’ relationships: The early impacts of Building Strong Families.  Executive summary.  Princeton, NJ: Mathematica Policy Research.

****

This article was written by Benjamin Karney and Thomas Bradbury, Professors in the UCLA Department of Psychology and Co-Directors of the Relationship Institute at UCLA (on Twitter: @UCLA_RI).

However, those couples that live together outside of marriage may do so without the intent of getting married.  If matrimony is your ultimate desire with your partner, it may still be in your best interest not to rush into that lease.  Last year, research out of the University of Denver found that married partners who lived together prior to getting engaged had poorer relationship outcomes (i.e., dissatisfaction, instability) a decade into their marriage compared with those who had moved in after the proposal (or waited until marriage).  In other words, if you move in with your partner after the engagement you have no more risk to your marriage quality than if you waited to move in together at marriage (or shortly thereafter).   And a report published in February of this year by the CDC–based on a national representative sample of over 12,000 participants–supports that claim: couples that were engaged with their partners at the time of moving in together had similar probabilities of making it at least 10 years as those who had never lived together before.  Incidentally, both groups had over a 60% chance of making it 10 years, regardless of whether they waited to move in at marriage, or after getting engaged.  It seems that modern American relationships can handle cohabitation prior to marriage.  Just wait for the ring for best results.

Further Reading:

CDC: Marriage and Cohabitation in the United States: A statistical Portrait Based on Cycle 6 (2002) of the National Survey of Family Growth

Rhoades, G.K., Stanley, S.M., and Markman H.J. (2009).  The pre-engagement cohabitation effect; A replication and extension of previous findings. Journal of Family Psychology (23) 1: 107-111.

Expressing gratitude can help keep a relationship together:

In one study, romantic partners had to keep track of their partner’s nice gestures. They reported thoughtful things that their partner had done for them that day (getting their partner’s favorite coffee, running errands for the partner, preparing a celebratory meal, etc) and whether they had expressed appreciation for the gesture. Six months later those that had expressed appreciation had a lower likelihood of breakup.

Expressing gratitude helps keep partners satisfied with life AND the relationship:

Building on the first study, participants who were romantically involved for at least six months participated in a “thanking task” in a lab session, and kept a diary of events for two weeks after. They had to notice their emotional responses to these daily interactions and their overall relationship satisfaction. After engaging in the “thanking task,” partners perceived each other as more responsive and appreciative to one another’s gestures, above and beyond just celebrating the good times. After reviewing the diaries, gratitude was found to be positively associated with relationship quality and satisfaction for both women and men. As Algoe stated in a news release, “feelings of gratitude and generosity are helpful in solidifying our relationships with people we care about, and benefit to the one giving as well as the one on the receiving end.” The quality of expressed appreciation was also important: high quality appreciation expressions were positively associated with high satisfaction in life and the relationship, even after controlling for a baseline relationship satisfaction at the study start.

Even small acts of kindness and feelings of gratitude can reflect the quality of the relationship. But the key is to feel a sense of appreciation for your partner’s goodwill, not indebtedness. Those that feel that they “owe” their partner might not experience the self esteem boost that gratitude can bring.

So if your romantic other has done something nice for you today, make sure to say thanks—and mean it! The resulting gratitude may help you both strengthen the relationship.

Further Reading:

Algoe, S.B., Fredrickson, B.L., Gable, S.L., & Strachman, A. Beyond “Thanks!” Expressions of appreciation as relationship glue. Presentation given at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Conference, Las Vegas, NV Janary 2010.

Algoe, S.B., Gable, S.L., and Maisel, N.C. It’s the little things: Everyday gratitude as a booster shot for romantic relationships. Personal relationships, 17 (2) 217-233.

Woznicki, K. A little gratitude keeps relationships strong. Web MD, May 24, 2010.

And therein lies a problem:  Paradoxically, parents’ day-to-day experiences of parenthood are often fraught with frustration.  Something IS sacrificed, and parenthood is not without real costs.  Parents unquestionably revel in times of great delight, yet these times are leavened with, and even overwhelmed by, tension, disputes, worry, and even outright anger.  These difficult emotions must somehow co-exist with the feelings of pride, devotion, and love that virtually all parents cherish.

Psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and colleagues illustrated these daily costs of parenting by using what they call the “Day Reconstruction Method” with about 1000 employed women.  This DRM asks respondents to report on the sequence of events that occurred the previous day – quick breakfast, get kids ready for school, drop kids off at school, commute to work, meeting with client, or whatever the events might be – to then estimate the times when transitions between events occurred, and to report on a dozen or so positive and negative emotions experienced in each of these activities using a 6-point scale.

Aggregated over all of the women (average age:  38; average household income: $54,700), here is the emotional signature of some of the various daily activities:

The most positive emotions occurred during

            Intimate relations (Highest)                5.10 (out of 6)

            Prayer and meditation                         4.35

            Watching TV                                      4.19

            Preparing food                                    3.93

            Taking care of children                       3.86

            Computer/email/internet                     3.81

            Housework                                          3.73

            Working                                              3.62

            Commuting (Lowest)                          3.45

 And what generates the most negative emotions?

            Working                                              .97 (out of 6)

            Taking care of children                       .91

            Commuting                                         .89

            On the telephone                                 .85

            Computer/email/internet                     .80

            Shopping                                             .74

Many parents will not be surprised to see that, when it comes to the experience of positive emotions in the flow of daily life, children rank below preparing food and just above working on the computer and doing housework.  And within the set of events generating negative emotions, children rank high on the list, producing feelings that fall between those experienced during work and commuting. 

(Many parents will also see that these events do not happen independently of one another; sometimes taking care of children happens while we are shopping AND on the telephone, after all, making all of these tasks more trying.)

Other studies round out this picture. Parenthood tends to make people more distressed than happy, for example, and women on average become happier in their marriages when children leave the home. 

The interesting point here is not that the immediate emotional experiences associated with children are similar to those produced by meal preparation (on the positive side) and commuting (on the negative side).  The interesting point is that we tend to have these emotions while also holding more general feelings of great love and pride for our children.  All of us parents manage to hold globally positive beliefs about our children, and to gain meaning and a sense of purpose from this relationship, while undertaking a slew of childcare activities that test our patience and, sometimes, our sanity.  This is what we as parents juggle.    

Knowing about these two distinct streams of emotional experience, what is a smart parent to do?  Here are three practical implications.

First, recognize that you have a kind of a firewall inside of you that allows you keep the globally positive and the specific negative experiences separate.  Maintain this firewall by not allowing your  momentary frustrations to engulf the more encompassing feelings of affection that you have for your child.  This is not the same as saying “Don’t get frustrated.”  Instead the point is to keep those feelings of frustration contained in your mind, so your feelings of love and affection are not compromised or eroded. 

Second, build up the globally positive feelings, even if this only means taking a moment every day to reflect on how your children enrich your life. Find a way to take pride in what you have been able to accomplish as a parent.  (In fact, this might brighten up your less-than-pleasant commute …)  Expanding upon these positive feelings may not be easy — you may have a special needs child, for example, or your child may be going through a difficult developmental period, or you may not be happy with yourself as a parent – but in this situations it is all the more essential that you see that spark or smile that makes your child so special. 

This brings us to a third suggestion:  reach out.  If you have a partner or spouse, recognize that juggling these two streams of emotion is part of his or her daily experience.  Help him or her to achieve this, for example, by actively reflecting on how your children are changing and growing, on one hand, or by finding ways to lighten the load that all those frustrations can create.  Initiate this conversation with your partner, and do the chores that need to be done.  (This tends to be a more important recommendation for men, who tend to do less of the daily chores and childcare, on average.)  Doing so can only tilt the balance of emotion in the right direction, for you and your partner.  If you are a single parent, or if your spouse is deployed or otherwise unavailable, find someone – a family member, another parent – with whom you can discuss both your joys and frustrations.

Finally, find times — when you are saying goodnight to your child, when she is strapped in to the car seat or in the grocery cart, or when you are giving him a bath – to tell your child how important he or she is to you, or how proud you are of him or her.  Create the moments now that you want your child to remember in those difficult moments that he or she may well encounter as a parent in the future.

Further Reading:

Baumeister, R.F. (1991). Meanings of life.  New York: Guilford. 

Gorchoff, S.M., John, O.P., & Helson, R. (2008). Contextualizing change in marital satisfaction during middle age: An 18-year longitudinal study. Psychological Science, 19, 1194-1200.

Kahneman, D., Krueger, A.B., Schkade, D.A., Schwarz, N., & Stone, A.A. (2004). A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: The Day Reconstruction Method.  Science, 306, 1776-1780.

Lyubomirsky, S., & Boehm, J.K. (2010). Human motives, happiness, and the puzzle of parenthood: Commentary on Kenrick et al. (2010). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5, 327-334.

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But adopting this approach overlooks the possibility that some conflicts really are different – and couples failing to recognize this fact may put themselves at a real disadvantage.  An excellent study by Lauren Papp and her colleagues identifies two conflicts that might be uniquely toxic in couples’ relationships, and toxic in different ways:  one takes a toll because it happens so much, and the other is damaging not because it is so frequent but because it is an important topic that never really goes away.

To study couples’ everyday disagreements, Dr. Papp and her team asked husbands and wives from 100 couples – married for 12 years on average, most with two or three children, and bringing in about $50,000 in household income – to keep a diary for 15 days in which they recorded their “differences of opinion.” For each disagreement they had, spouses then provided details on how long this particular bout lasted, the feelings it generated, and how they left the issue.  Asking people about a disagreement shortly after it occurred is demanding, but doing so is likely to be far more accurate than simply asking spouses what they disagree about in general, when the conflicts have faded into distant memory.

Seven hundred and forty-eight conflicts later, three groups of conflicts can be identified – at least in terms of frequency:

Least Frequent, ranging from 6% to 12% of all conflicts:  annoying personality styles and traits, friends, intimacy and sex, commitment and expectations for the relationship, and relatives.  Bear in mind that these couples had already negotiated 12 years of marriage without divorcing, suggesting that many of these core issues had been managed pretty well by them.

Moderately Frequent, ranging from 16% to 25% of all conflicts:  annoying habits, money and spending, demands relating to work and jobs, leisure and recreation, communication and listening, and chores.

Most Frequent:  Children, by a wide margin.  Nearly 40% of all conflicts involved kids:  what the child is doing and why, disagreements about what to do in response to what the child has done, how to discipline the child, who will take care of the child, disputes over removing vegetables from the child’s ears, and so on.

This last point might be disturbing to younger couples who do not yet have children, but it is likely to be old news to veteran parents.  Children are the source of many wonderful things, but they also keep parents on their toes by creating all kinds of situations that prompt partners to somehow coordinate their actions if they are to manage the situation well.  Conflict between mom and dad no doubt arise when one or both parents are trying to do something else – working, cooking, parenting other children, talking on the telephone, resting – when the child requires one parent to disengage immediately and attend to some new circumstance.  Who disengages, whose turn it is to take care of the child, who is responsible at that moment, who is at fault, who is free to help out, and so on, all become the grist for this particular mill.

But it is another problem – money, spending, wages and salary, bills — that absorbs more time than all the others, that is likely to be rated as recurrent and important, that instigates feelings of depression and outbursts of anger, and that is most likely to be set aside for discussion at a later time – even despite demanding more problem-solving efforts from the partners than problems that do not involve money.  To make matters worse, conflicts over money often arise along with conflicts about work – two common sources of stress and tension that are unlikely to go away on their own accord.  Collected 10 years ago, long before the recent downturn in the economy, these data probably underestimate the kinds of financial tensions that many couples now face.

In the end, we learn something important about two unique problems that many couples confront, and about how to meet them head-on:

Resolving conflicts involving children will likely involve seamless tag-teaming and coordination around the immediate demands that children place on couples — and managing the feeling that you and your partner may never have as much time or patience as you might want.

Resolving conflicts involving money will require many tactics, including an open dialog about finances and work within the relationship, respect and appreciation for the work and money you do have, productive conversations about careful budgeting and controlled spending, anticipating the anger and frustration you are likely to experience – and managing the feeling that you and your partner may never have as much money as you might want.

Neither problem will be easy – they are common for a reason, after all  – but partners who understand the unique demands that these two issues create position themselves for a smoother course in their relationship.

Further Reading:

Papp, L.M., Cummings, E.M., & Goeke-Morey, M.C. (2009). For richer, for poorer: Money as a topic of marital conflict in the home.  Family Relations, 58, 91-103.

Therapists face an uphill struggle when working to improve relationships.  Couples are usually mired deeply in their unhappiness by the time they get around to consulting a mental health professional, and the distress they bring to the therapist is potent and rarely remits on its own.  And conducting a formal experiment of treatments that might work requires a large number of these couples, sound theories about what it takes to bring about lasting change in their relationship, and well-trained therapists to deliver the active ingredients.

Dr. Andrew Christensen, one of the world’s leading scientists in this field, led a team at UCLA and the University of Washington that compared two types of therapies for distressed couples.  One therapy focused intently on changing the mechanics of couples’ communication, on restoring positive experiences between partners, and on solving problems ‘in the here and now.’  Hopes were modest for this approach because prior studies suggested that it did not produce lasting change.  The alternative treatment was designed, in part, to recognize the limits of this earlier approach:  if couples were not changing so much, then maybe they could learn to downplay the unpleasant parts of the relationship and focus on the strengths.  This alternative does aim to change communication, but it focuses a lot more on helping couples to accept their partner and to not over-react emotionally to the slights and gripes that occur routinely in intimate partnerships.

Participating spouses were in their early 40s and were well-educated; they had been married about 10 years on average.  Most of the couples – 68 of 134 – had children.  All couples were ‘chronically and seriously distressed’ according to measurement conventions in the field.  About half of the couples were assigned randomly to each of the two therapies, which were delivered by closely supervised practitioners over the course of 26 sessions.

So which works better:  helping couples change so they get what they want, or helping couples try to want (or at least tolerate) what they already have?  In fact, Christensen et al. (2010) report that both approaches work equally well over 5 years – couples in the two groups divorce at about the same rate (26-28%) and those who are still together after 5 years report virtually identical levels of relationship happiness.

But how much improvement occurred overall?  Using the 5-year data, Christensen and colleagues classified all couples receiving therapy on the basis of whether they are deteriorated (this included all the divorces, and all other couples who did not divorce but indicated they were miserable), unchanged in relationship happiness compared to where they started, improved from where they started, or recovered (that is, improved and indistinguishable from happy couples in the general population).

Couples therapy, it seems, is largely a matter of up or out:  The highest proportion of couples – 38% — deteriorated, and another 14% were unchanged.  Another 16% improved, and fully 32% recovered.  About half of all couples either fail to change or deteriorate, and about half improve – and most of these improve by a sizeable margin.  On balance, given the enormous difficulty of the task for couples and for therapists, this is very good news.

Further Reading:

Christensen, A., Atkins, D.C., Baucom, B., & Yi, J. (2010). Marital status and satisfaction five years following a randomized clinical trial comparing traditional versus integrative behavioral couple therapy.  Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 78, 225-235.

Viagra was not developed to improve relationships, of course, but from the research I have read it does what it does – improve male sexual functioning – very reliably and consistently. Partners of men taking Viagra also report improved sexual satisfaction. Score this as one real advance for medical science!

The randomized experiments used to examine the effects of Viagra can be used to determine whether relationships also benefit. Given the importance of sex to relationship functioning, and given the tension that can arise when sexual intimacy is disrupted, I expected to see clear evidence that couples using Viagra to treat ED would be happier than they were before treatment – and happier after treatment than those receiving a placebo. I was surprised to learn that this is usually not the case, and a quick review of the evidence on this point sheds some light on sex and close relationships.

(If you think that it is pretty easy to guess accurately whether you or your partner is in the Viagra or placebo group in these studies, you are correct. This means that the comparisons of people to their own baseline measures of relationship functioning are more informative than Viagra-placebo comparisons.)

A 2007 study of 180 men and their partners reported by noted researcher Julia Heiman and colleagues showed that ratings of relationship satisfaction did not improve through 12 weeks for those couples taking Viagra. However, sexual satisfaction at the end of treatment with Viagra was better for women who were happier with their relationship at the start of treatment. Like investment bankers, the rich do tend to get richer. But the opposite happened for men: greater sexual satisfaction was achieved by those with lower baseline relationship satisfaction scores – perhaps because of new found confidence in the bedroom. Something about the relationship affects the pill, not vice-versa.

Another 2007 study, this one involving 108 couples, suggested that female partners of men taking Viagra were happier at the end of treatment than the partners of men taking the placebo (Hundertmark et al., 2007). A ray of hope? Not really, because the placebo group dropped in relationship happiness ratings while the Viagra group held steady. Overall, couples in which the man was taking Viagra changed very little in relationship satisfaction.

Why doesn’t Viagra improve relationships in more obvious ways? One possibility is that the people who seek help are already pretty happy in their relationships, leaving little room for improvement. But even in those couples where there is room for improvement, taking Viagra does not seem to boost relationship satisfaction on average. It may be that by the time couples reach their mid-50s or 60s, their happiness is already pretty stable, wherever that might be, and little can change it. Another possibility is that Viagra really improves some relationships but creates new conflicts in others, leaving the overall or average effect something of a wash.

Perhaps the most interesting finding in this small set of studies comes from another report Heiman and colleagues published just last year (Aubin et al., 2009). This team compared a group of 24 couples receiving only Viagra for 12 weeks with another group of 27 couples receiving Viagra for 12 weeks and 8 sessions of sex therapy. Neither group changed much in relationship happiness, but in the group receiving sex therapy, 88% of all men and 79% of their partners reported that the sex therapy was a very important or extremely important influence on their response to the medication. Here, attending to the sexual dynamics within the relationship seemed to play a crucial role in how couples respond to the medication itself.

So what do we learn? Surprisingly, relationships may influence Viagra more than Viagra influences relationships. Or more memorably: the affection to erection path might be more reliable than the than erection to affection path. Psychologists’ jobs are safe for now, and in fact their efforts might be instrumental in enhancing the benefits that Viagra provides.

Further Reading:

Aubin, S., Heiman, J.R., Berger, R.E., Murallo, A.V., & Yung-Wen, L. (2009). Comparing sildenafil alone versus sildenafil plus brief couple sex therapy on erectile dysfunction and couples’ sexual and marital quality of life: A pilot study. Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, 35, 122-143.

Heiman, J.R., Talley, D.R., Bailen, J.L., Oskin, T.A., Rosenberg, S.J., Pae, C.R., Creanga, D.L., & Bavendam, T. (2007). Sexual function and satisfaction in heterosexual couples when men are administered sildenafil citrate (Viagra) for erectile dysfunction: A multicentre, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 114, 437-447.

Hundertmark, J., Esterman, A., Ben-Tovim, D., Austin, M., & Dougherty, M. (2007). The South Australian Couples Sildenafil Study: Double-blind, parallel-group randomized controlled study to examine the psychological and relationship consequences of sildenafil use in couples. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 4, 1126-1135.