Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
Finding a perfect match has now moved beyond astrology and star signs.
Oxford University academicians have developed a scientific formula that will be put to use by the website eHarmony.com.au to find the most compatible match.
This dating service uses the patented ‘Compatibility Matching System’ to find appropriate partners for its members based on their psychological profiles. The website will soon be launched in Australia.
This project is one of the biggest of its kind and involves the study of over more than 700 Australian married couples to develop a country-specific match-making formula. In order to have a first date sanctioned, prospective couples should be matched on “29 key dimensions” such as emotional temperament, social style, intelligence and spiritual beliefs.
According to eHarmony psychologist Dr Galen Buckwalter, the criteria guarantees that couples will have almost an 80 per cent probability of being among the happiest long-term relationships. To get the psychological profile, new members are made to undergo a rigorous assessment that includes 256 questions to determine their personality type, beliefs and values. Then their psychological profiles are processed in a matching system to find potential matches for a successful long-term relationship.
“What we see constantly is that, in general, similarities are much more preferable for long-term relationship satisfaction. It’s not like you are looking for your clone but it does seem that if your basic personality is fairly similar, you have a much better chance of understanding each other emotionally. Some of the formulas we are using in Australia are unique but we don’t reveal the secret sauce; it’s a competitive business,” said Dr Buckwalter, head of eHarmony’s research and development.
He pointed out emotional reactivity or how quickly a person responds with an emotion and socialising habits as crucial factors in finding a good match. However, he ruled out the belief that opposites attract, claiming that this may be true for first glances but not long-term relationships.
“Opposites attract but then they attack. If you are different in fundamental traits, you seem to spend a lot of emotional energy working out differences,” he said
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Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
The next time you have a row with your spouse make sure to vent your anger, for a fight may be good for a couple’s health.
The study, led by Ernest Harburg, professor emeritus with the U-M School of Public Health and the Psychology Department, stated that couples in which both the husband and wife suppress their anger when one attacks the other, die earlier than the members of couples, where one or both partners express their anger and resolve the conflict.
In the study, the researchers followed 192 couples over 17 years and placed the couples into one of four categories: both partners communicate their anger; in the second and third groups one spouse expresses while the other suppresses; and both the husband and wife suppress their anger and brood.
“Comparison between couples in which both people suppress their anger, and the three other types of couples, are very intriguing,” Harburg said.
When both spouses suppress their anger at the other when unfairly attacked, earlier death was twice as likely than in all other types. “When couples get together, one of their main jobs is reconciliation about conflict,” Harburg said.
“Usually nobody is trained to do this. If they have good parents, they can imitate, that’s fine, but usually the couple is ignorant about the process of resolving conflict. The key matter is, when the conflict happens, how do you resolve it?”
“When you don’t, if you bury your anger, and you brood on it and you resent the other person or the attacker, and you don’t try to resolve the problem, then you’re in trouble,” he added.
Of the 192 couples studied, 26 pairs both suppressed their anger and there were 13 deaths in that group. In the remaining 166 pairs, there were 41 deaths combined.
In 27 per cent of those couples who both suppressed their anger, one member of the couple died during the study period, and in 23 per cent of those couples both died during the study period.
That’s compared to only six per cent of the couples where both spouses died in the remaining three groups combined. Only 19 per cent in the remaining three groups combined saw one partner die during the study period.
The paper, “Marital Pair Anger Coping Types May Act as an Entity to Affect Mortality: Preliminary Findings from a Prospective Study” is published in the Journal of Family Communication.
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