paper that looked a lot like a chart of the ups and downs of the
stock market over the course of a typical day. What he does, he
explains, is track the ups and downs of a couple’s level of
positive and negative emotion, and he’s found that it doesn’t
take very long to figure out which way the line on the graph is
going. “Some go up, some go down,” he says. “But once they
start going down, toward negative emotion, ninety-four percent
will continue going down. They start on a bad course and they
can’t correct it. I don’t think of this as just a slice in time. It’s an
indication of how they view their whole relationship.”
3. The Importance of Contempt
Let’s dig a little deeper into the secret of Gottman’s success
rate. Gottman has discovered that marriages have distinctive
signatures, and we can find that signature by collecting very
detailed emotional information from the interaction of a couple.
But there’s something else that is very interesting about
Gottman’s system, and that is the way in which he manages to
simplify the task of prediction. I hadn’t realized how much of
an issue this was until I tried thin-slicing couples myself. I got
one of Gottman’s tapes, which had on it ten three-minute clips