Current Projects
Creating Healthy Relationships Project (2006-Present)
The main objective of the Creating Healthy Relationships Project is to implement and test a psycho-educational workshop for couples in the Seattle-Tacoma area. The workshop was developed by Dr. Gottman and his wife, Dr. Julie Gottman, and is based on their 35+ years of experience doing research and working with couples in therapeutic contexts. The goals of the workshop are to provide couples with better conflict management skills, improve communication between partners, strengthen the parenting alliance, increase intimacy, and improve overall relationship satisfaction. This project is federally funded through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families (Grant # 90OJ2022). We are in the process of assessing whether the workshop will be effective in encouraging better relationships in low-income families.
Our overall goal in this project is to provide empirical evidence that shows the workshop to be effective in assisting low-income couples who are experiencing distress and conflict within their relationships. We hope that such evidence will enhance our ability to offer the program to more families in the future by encourage public policy-makers to provide funding and support for program implementation in a wider area.
Past Projects
Couples Decision Making Project (2008-2010)
The Couples Communication Study was conducted so that we could learn more about how low-income couples make important decisions. We were asked by our collaborators, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., and funding agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, to evaluate how couples who are receiving public assistance communicate and make decisions about things related to, for example, finances, household chores, and parenting. Our goal was to understand how these couples make decisions so that we can assess the need to improve the programs and services that are offered to low-income families in the U.S. Couples who participated in this project were asked to engage in a variety of tasks together focused on decision-making; for instance, they were asked to talk about how they would spend hypothetical lottery money that the family won and decide how the money would be spent.
Bringing Baby Home Project (1999-2005)
The Bringing Baby Home (BBH) Program combines scientific research and service delivery in order to improve the quality of life for babies and children by strengthening their families and parental relationships. The Bringing Baby Home Program aims to achieve these goals by offering new and expecting parents a weekend workshop designed to teach parents how to strengthen their relationships and foster infant development during the oftentimes stressful transition to parenthood. Findings from a randomized clinical trial examining the effectiveness of the Bringing Baby Home Program indicate that couples who participate in the workshop have higher relationship quality, less interpersonal hostility, and markedly lower maternal post-partum depression and baby blues.
The Relationship Research Institute's aim is to promote social change by making the Bringing Baby Home Program available as part of the standard birth preparation program offered to expectant couples in hospitals throughout the nation and around the world. If we are successful, millions of babies and young families at every socio-economic level and from every ethnic and racial group will experience a healthier, happier transition to parenthood that is characterized by emotionally sensitive parenting and positive family relationships.
Please visit www.bbhonline.org for more information about the Bringing Baby Home Program, including how to become a BBH Certified Gottman Educator and to find a BBH workshop in your area.
Newlywed Study (1998)
The Newlywed Study was Dr. John Gottman's renowned study of 130 newlywed couples, whom he studied over a 6-year period after they first got married. This study explored couples' interaction patterns in hopes of identifying the types of affect and behaviors that are most predictive of divorce and relationship dysfunction, as well as marital satisfaction and happiness. Couples who participated in this study were asked to engage in a discussion about an area of disagreement. These interactions were later assessed using the Specific Affect Coding System (SPAFF), an observational coding system, for affective communicative behaviors displayed by both husbands and wives on a second-by-second basis throughout the discussion. Results from this study show that the ratio of positive to negative emotions displayed by couples while they interacted was highly predictive of relationship quality. When couples displayed a high level of negative affect and coercive interaction patterns (e.g., contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling), the relationship was more likely to end in divorce. In contrast, when couples exhibited a higher ratio of positive compared to negative behaviors (i.e., ratio of 5 positive affective behaviors to every 1 negative), they were more likely to be in healthy, satisfying relationships that lasted throughout the six year study period.
The "Love Lab"—Where it all Began:
In 1986, Dr. John Gottman joined the University of Washington's Department of Psychology, where he started the Family Research Laboratory. The Family Research Laboratory was the site for numerous studies on marriage, couples, parenting, and child development. While at the University of Washington, Dr. Gottman engaged in research aimed at enhancing our understanding of intimate relationships in families and used an array of techniques to study families of all kinds. Dr. Gottman’s methods included using what researchers refer to as a “multi-method approach”. This approach takes into account the fact that individuals function on many levels when they interact in social settings. For example, people think certain thoughts, and feel different emotions; their bodies also respond in various ways (e.g., increased rate of breathing, heart rate, and sweating).
Use of the multi-method approach allowed Dr. Gottman to study these different facets of functioning while family members interacted with one another. To understand what was going on in their minds, he asked them to share their thoughts and feelings via interviews and surveys. To identify how their bodies reacted, he hooked people up to physiological sensors and monitors. To understand their behavior, he used observational techniques that recorded their voices and actions. By gathering information on all of these things, he was able to obtain a full picture of individual functioning while family members interacted with one another.
Family interactions can also be influenced by the context in which the interactions take place. Some people may act one way at home, when they think they are alone, and act another way when in public, or when they are in front of someone else. Therefore, Dr. Gottman used both laboratory and naturalistic research techniques. For example, he might ask a family to come into his lab and have a discussion about an important issue so that he could monitor their interactions within a highly controlled laboratory environment. At other times, he might observe family interactions while the family was at home having dinner, or when parents got home from work and told each other about their days. Both of these approaches—naturalistic and laboratory—have strengths and limitations. Dr. Gottman wanted to find a way to take advantage of the strengths of both of these approaches, which is why he eventually came up with the Love Lab, which was a “semi-naturalistic” environment.
The Love Lab was a studio apartment on Seattle’s Montlake Cut that had a view of the water and, like most apartments, was furnished with a plush sofa bed, a television, a kitchenette, a dining room table, and a bathroom. What made it different than most apartments was that it was also furnished with a series of cameras that were mounted in the corners of the ceiling so that couples who stayed there could be continuously videotaped. Special equipment was also used in the bathrooms, so that, when couples used the toilets, urine samples would be collected and levels of various hormones in their bodies were measured throughout the day. When Dr. Gottman invited couples to the Love Lab, they made arrangements to stay overnight and were asked to bring with them a bag of groceries to prepare dinner and any snacks, reading materials, or games they wanted to use during their visit. The Love Lab was set up so that it would have all the comforts of home and make couples feel comfortable and act naturally, while also allowing for systematic assessment of exactly what they were doing, talking about, and how their bodies were responding.
More than 300 couples participated in Dr. Gottman’s “Love Lab”. Researchers used the information gathered from the Love Lab couples, couples who visited Dr. Gottman’s original lab, and couples that he studied at home to draw conclusions about different types of affect and behavior patterns in couples, and how these relate to the quality of couples' relationships.
Dr. Gottman and his researchers claimed to be able to identify couples who would divorce within the first three minutes of watching them discuss an area of conflict. Behaviors observed while couples interacted were eventually evaluated by researchers who used the Specific Affect Coding System (SPAFF), which allows researchers to code or classify individuals’ interaction patterns by integrating their nonverbal facial expressions, vocal intonation, and dialogue content. From a second-by-second analysis of each partner’s behavior, we know that when couples express contempt towards one another, are defensive or critical of one another, or withdraw during an argument and seemingly ignore one another (i.e., stonewall), they are experiencing what Dr. Gottman refers to as the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”. These four corrosive behaviors have shown to be highly correlated with divorce and relationship dissolution.
As word got out about what Dr. Gottman was doing with couples in his lab, it was designated by the popular press as the "Love Lab". The Love Lab tradition of using a multi-method approach to evaluate family members interacting with one another in order to draw conclusions about love and relationships continues today at Dr. Gottman's current lab, the Relationship Research Institute. The Relationship Research Institute was created by Dr. Gottman to continue his legacy of conducting highly rigorous, cutting- edge research about relationships, couples, children, parenting, and families. The primary goal of the Relationship Research Institute is to strengthen relationships and enhance the lives of families through research. We hope that findings from the research conducted by Dr. Gottman and his team of scientists at the Love Lab will provide support for families and other interpersonal relationships in the Pacific Northwest and around the world.