What Makes Bad Communication ‘Stick’ to Marriages?

Thomas N. Bradbury Ph.D., UCLA

Among couple therapists, communication problems are cited as the most common reason why couples seek professional help with their relationship. Is there evidence to support the idea that deficiencies do in fact contribute to deterioration in relationship functioning? And, more importantly, if poor communication is implicated in the onset of relationship difficulties, what are the specific elements of communication likely to foreshadow these declines?

In the largest observational study to date conducted with newlywed couples, Thomas Bradbury and colleagues at UCLA videotaped couples as they discussed an important area of disagreement in their relationship. Common topics of discussion included religion, children, in-laws, sex, money, and communication. Each speaking turn in the conversation was coded for the presence of positive communication skills (e.g., agreement, proposal of positive solutions) and negative communication skills (e.g., justifying one’s own behavior, disagreement, proposing negative solutions, like “If you don’t like the way I do the laundry, do it yourself!). Because even neutral statements can be delivered with positive and negative emotions, these too were coded; common positive emotions include humor, interest, and affection, and common negative emotions include anger and contempt.

The 172 couples, all without children and all in their first marriages, then completed self-report measures of relationships satisfaction twice per year over the ensuing four years — that is, the period in which divorce and dissolution are most common.

Although communication skills and expressed emotions both predicted faster rates of deterioration in relationship satisfaction, it was their combination that proved most important: high levels of negative communication skills were indeed predictive of faster rates of decline in satisfaction, but only when expressions of positive emotions were relatively rare. That is, when couples had high levels of negative communication AND high levels of humor, interest, and affection, their rate of deterioration was the same as those couples in which negative communication behaviors were less frequent (regardless of their level of positive emotion). Very similar results were obtained for positive communication skills. When couples displayed few such skills, their marriage declined in satisfaction, but again only when positive emotions were relatively infrequent. These effects remained after controlling for initial levels of satisfaction, and for the severity of the problem that couples were discussing.

These findings are provocative because they suggest that it is critically important to understand variation in positive emotion if we are to understand the strong negative emotions that often develop in unhappy relationships. It seems likely that positive emotion is especially potent, even for couples with low levels of positive communication skills and high levels of negative communication skills, because it conveys key messages to the partner. E.g., we might be disagreeing, but we are in this together. Or, we don’t see eye to eye on this, but your opinion matters to me. Or, yes this is a source of tension for us, but I do not perceive your behavior as threatening. Positive emotions might operate like teflon; negative communications do not ’stick’ to the marriage if the emotional climate in the marriage is marked by humor, interest, and affect.

These findings may help to explain why programs designed to prevent the development of distress in newlywed couples are not very successful: they have focused intently on communication skills as the key feature in resolving disagreements, when it may be the emotional tone — and specifically the presence of positive emotions — that bolster the quality of couples intimate bond. Leading prevention programs tend to focus on the management of negativity and negative emotions, but this may be only a small part of the story. This new study suggests that relatively poor communication skills need not be detrimental to a relationship if couples also have the capacity to share one another’s humor, express interest in what each other is saying even if they do not agree with it, and convey that underneath any differences of opinion there is a foundation of caring — but it is important that these feelings be expressed. (Along similar lines, models of marital therapy that focus on restructuring couples’ communication behaviors have not proven very successful; successful models of marital therapy appear to involve emotional expression and acceptance rather than explicit changes in interactional behaviors.)

New research needs to be conducted to help explain why some couples are more emotionally positive than others as newlyweds. How does this happen? Simply being happier in the relationship is not enough; this was true for virtually all of the couples in this study when it began. Likely candidates are experiences in the family of origin and the degree of chronic and/or acute stress that partners are dealing with; both might compromise basic capacities for partners to reach out to one another, which in turn appears to increase the odds that the couple will find themselves unhappy even just four years after marriage.

Johnson, M.D., Cohan, C.L., Davila, J., Lawrence, E., Rogge, R.D., Karney, B.R., Sullivan, K.T., & Bradbury, T.N. (2005). Problem-solving skills and affective expressions as predictors of change in marital satisfaction. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 73, 15-27.

Support for this project was provided by NIMH and NICHD.