Since the 1980s, Gottman has brought more than three thousand married couples into a small room in his "love lab" near the University of Washington campus. Each couple has been videotaped, and the results have been analyzed according to something Gottman dubbed SPAFF (for specific affect), a coding system that has twenty separate categories corresponding to every conceivable emotion that a married couple might express during a conversation.
For example, the emotion disgust is coded a 1, contempt is 2, anger is 7, defensiveness is 10, whining is 11, sadness is 12, stonewalling is 13, neutral is 14, and so on.
Gottman has taught his staff how to read every emotional nuance in people's facial expressions and how to interpret seemingly ambiguous bits of dialogue.
When they watch a couple on videotape, they assign a SPAFF code to every second of the couple's interaction, so that a
fifteen-minute conflict discussion ends up being translated into a row of eighteen hundred numbers - nine hundred for the husband and nine hundred for the wife.
The husband and wife are also wearing electrodes and sensors so that the coders know, for example, when the husband's or the wife's heart was pounding or when his or her temperature was rising or when either of them was jiggling in his or her seat, and all of that information is fed into a complex equation.
On the basis of those calculations, Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent.
"People are in one of two states in a relationship," Gottman went on. "The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It's like a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they'll say, 'Oh, he's just in a crummy mood.'
Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative. In the negative sentiment override state, people draw lasting conclusions about each other. If their spouse does something positive, they'll think he/she is a selfish person doing a positive thing.
It's really hard to change those states, and those states determine whether when one party tries to repair things, the other party sees that as repair or hostile manipulation.
For example, I'm talking with my wife, and she says, 'Will you shut up and let me finish?' In positive sentiment override, I say, 'Sorry, go ahead.' I'm not very happy, but I recognize her upset and make a repair attempt.
In negative sentiment override, I say, 'To hell with you, I'm not getting a chance to finish either. You're such a b...h, you remind me of your mother.'"
Gottman has gotten so good at thin-slicing marriages that he says he can be in a restaurant and eavesdrop on the couple one table over and get a pretty good sense of whether they need to start thinking about hiring lawyers and dividing up custody of the children.
How does he do it? He has figured out that he doesn't need to pay attention to everything that happens.
He has found that he can find out much of what he needs to know just by focusing on what he calls the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.
Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt.
If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.
"You would think that criticism would be the worst," Gottman says, "because criticism is a global condemnation of a person's character. Yet contempt is qualitatively different from criticism. With criticism I might say to my wife, 'You never listen, you are really selfish and insensitive.' Well, she's going to respond defensively to that. That's not very good for our problem solving and interaction.
However, in truth, if I speak from a superior plane, that's going to be far more damaging. Contempt is any statement made from a higher level. A lot of the time it's an insult: 'You are a b....h. You're scum.' It's trying to put that person on a lower plane than youself. It's hierarchical."
Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.
"Contempt is closely related to disgust, and what disgust and contempt are about is completely rejecting and excluding someone from the community. The big gender difference with negative emotions is that women are more critical, and men are more likely to stonewall. We find that when women start talking about a problem, the men get irritated and turn away, and then the women get more critical, and it becomes a circle. But there isn't any gender difference when it comes to contempt. Not at all."
Contempt is special. If you can measure contempt, then all of a sudden you don't need to know every detail of the couple's relationship to be able to predict their future.
_____________________________________________________
Click here 
