To rekindle the marital spark, science says to look at cute animal pictures together

AmoMama
AmoMama
Sep 6, 2018 · 3 min read

A new study has shown that the marital spark could be kept alive by simply looking at images of stimuli that invoke positive feelings together with their spouse.

A team of psychological scientists led by James K. McNulty of Florida State University came up with the unconventional method after a series of experiments that showed people who associated their spouse with cute animals had a better opinion of them.

For the most part, even if behaviors don’t change over time, marriage satisfaction declines after years of being together. While most psychologists focus on changing a couple’s behavior, McNulty’s study instead focused on “changing someone’s thoughts about their spouse.”

The study relied on “subtly retraining the immediate, automatic associations that come to mind when people think about their spouses.”

A happy couple with a cat/Shutterstock

“One ultimate source of our feelings about our relationships can be reduced to how we associate our partners with positive affect, and those associations can come from our partners but also from unrelated things, like puppies and bunnies,” McNulty explained.

The study had people looked at photos of their spouse alongside photos of cute animals like puppies and bunny rabbits, and a control group looking at photos of their spouse alongside generic things like buttons.

At the end of a period of time, those who had been seeing their spouse next to adorable fur-babies had far better associations with their partners than those looking at buttons.

Dog laying on the grass/Shutterstock

“The idea that something so simple and unrelated to marriage could affect how people feel about their marriage,made me skeptical,” McNulty saidof his first reaction to the proposed experiment. He was surprised by the results of the experiment.

“The study found that those who’d been shown their spouses’ faces together with puppies, bunnies, sunsets, and other happy images had developed over the course of the experiments even more positive associations for their mate than they had when the study began. More promisingly, their levels of marital satisfaction went up.”

Kitten/Shutterstock

In conclusion, the authors of the study wrote:

“To our knowledge, this is the first experimental study to demonstrate sustained attitude change toward a well-known object using a low-thought approach such as evaluative conditioning. Thus, the present work represents a step toward documenting how attitudes slowly evolve over time through passive exposure to attitude-object-relevant information.”

While it probably doesn’t mean that a new puppy will save a failing marriage, it is interesting to note how unconscious opinions can be conditioned over time with something seemingly completely unrelated.

AmoMama creates engaging and meaningful content for women. Read more at news.amomama.com

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