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A new study from the University of Arizona shows that people can actually reveal how they are handling divorce using verbal cues or how they say things, rather than what they say.
The study's title is "Thin-Slicing Divorce: Thirty Seconds of Information Predict Changes in Psychological Adjustment Over 90 Days" and it is published online via Psychological Science.
Ashley Mason is a doctoral student who conducted the said research. “We wanted to know how much information people actually need in order to know how another person is coping,” she said “There’s been a lot of person-perception research in terms of perceiving a stranger’s personality or intelligence. And data have shown that we really don’t need much.”
During the course of the study, both men and women who had experienced romantic separation were recruited. They were asked to complete a series of questionares, audio recordings, as well as stream-of-consciousness exercises to reveal their feelings about their exes and their past relationships. After 90 days, the subjects were asked to answer the same questionnaires.
Judges were then asked to participate in the study. There were two sets of judges; one who listened to the audio recordings and the other set who only read the transcripts. The judges were asked, based on the data, to assess which subjects were better able to control their emotions and cope with the stress of the separation.
The significant part of the study shows that the judges were more able to predict how the subjects would fare after 90 days by listening to 30-second audio clips than by reading through the written answers to questionnaires.
“It’s important to know that it is not about what people are saying. It’s how they’re saying it that is tipping us off to how they’re doing, and more importantly, how they’re going to do,” Mason said. |
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