How Cute Animals Could Save Your Marriage

If your marriage is in trouble, you're likely going to get a lot of advice. One suggestion you probably haven't heard of? Go gawk at some cute animals.

But that's just what new research published last month in Psychological Science suggests could work.

Researchers hoped to discover if retraining the initial associations people had when thinking about their spouses could improve marital satisfaction. A Department of Defense grant funded the research, part of its Military Suicide Research Consortium looking "to stem the suicide rate of active military members and veterans," The Wall Street Journal reports.

Study author James K. McNulty of Florida State University was asked to figure out a way to test (and then actually test) how married couples deal with "the stress of separation and deployment," McNulty said a statement.

The study hinged on evaluative conditioning – "what happens when our mind learns to associate an object or person with a feeling – good or bad – that we had when we were previously around that object or person," The Wall Street Journal reports.

Couples (separately) looked at images once every three days over the course of six weeks. The participants in the experimental group saw their partner's face with positive words or images, i.e., puppies and bunnies, compared to the control group, which was shown neutral words or images, like a picture of a button. The study included 144 married couples; the pairs averaged 28 years old and had been married less than five years.

Also, every two weeks for eight weeks, researchers evaluated participants' attitudes toward their partner. They did so by asking participants what they thought of the emotional tone of a series of positive and negative words, all after viewing pictures of faces (their partner's included).

The researchers found their experiment was a success. People who saw positive images along with their partner's face versus neutral images had more positive automatic reactions to their partner throughout the intervention. Such reactions also forecast higher marital satisfaction as the study continued.

For such automatic associations to work, it's most important for spouses to interact with each other, the researchers note. But short interventions like these could be a part of marriage counseling or helpful in difficult long-distance relationships.