Contempt. Stonewalling. Criticism. Defensiveness.
The Gottman Marriage Study assigned one of 20 different emotional states to each member of a couple every second during a 15 minute video recording of a conversation between the couple. The study found they were able to predict divorce within 15 years with a 95% accuracy after recording for an hour. Gottman applied the Pareto Principle to his results and found that just 4 of the 20 different states were enough to accurately predict divorce:
- Contempt - equally shared by both sexes
- Stonewalling - more often done by men
- Critcism - more often done by women
- Defensiveness - I WASN’T BEING DEFENSIVE