John Gottman and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!
John Gottman and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!
In the message I delivered on Sunday 7th April, I made mention of the work of a marriage researcher by the name of Dr. John Gottman. Some people expressed interest in getting further information.
Imagine someone so painstaking as to do the following:- to study over 3,000 married couples over a 30 year period; to video record their conversations and assign an emotional code (e.g. anger, sadness, surprise, annoyance, etc) to every frame of the video for later analysis; to monitor two channels of electrocardiogram for each person; to analyse their urine samples for stress hormone levels; to analyse their blood samples to test for immune function; and to collate this mountain of data in order to test for patterns and correlations, seeking the answer to the ultimate question…what makes a marriage succeed, and what makes it fail?
Happily, it is not necessary for us to know anything about this mountain of data, because Gottman has managed to distil down the very essence of what is important, leaving aside that which is not. So successful has Gottman been in extracting the essentials for what makes a marriage work, that simply by listening to a couple speak with each other for 15 minutes, he can predict with over 90% accuracy whether their marriage will succeed or fail. The rather dry-witted Gottman admits that this facility of his has markedly reduced the number of dinner party invitations he now receives.
You may wish to investigate the following:
Making Marriage Work (Live) Audible Audiobook – Original recording
https://www.amazon.com/Making-Marriage-Work-Live/dp/B000KLPH1G
This costs the absurdly low price of $US4.39
The audio recording goes for about 40 minutes and is a brilliant summary presentation by Gottman of his key findings.
(I believe that Amazon also offer a DVD version of – I think – the same presentation, for $US34.95: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Marriage-Work-John-Gottman/dp/B000GOQRPM)
Gottman also has a book:
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
$30.99 from Dymocks
The book is good, and much more detailed, but for my money the 40-minute audio recording is just gold: so concise, so effective, so brilliant (and so cheap!).
Michael D