Science Says Fight with spouse is good for health

The study, led by Ernest Harburg, professor emeritus with the U-M School of Public Health and the Psychology Department, stated that couples in which both the husband and wife suppress their anger when one attacks the other, die past than the members of couples, where one or both partners express their irritation and decide the conflict. In the study, the researchers followed 192 couples over 17 years and placed the couples into one of four categories: both partners speak their anger; in the second and third groups one spouse expresses while the other suppresses; and both the husband and wife suppress their anger and brood.

“Comparison between couples in which both people suppress their anger, and the three other types of couples, are very intriguing,” Harburg said.

When both spouses suppress their anger at the other when unfairly attacked, earlier death was twice as probable as in all other types. “When couples get together, one of their main jobs is reconciliation about clash,” Hamburg said.

“Usually nobody is trained to do this. If they have good parents, they can imitate, that’s fine, but usually the couple is ignorant about the process of resolve disagreement. The key matter is, when the conflict happens, how do you resolve it?” “When you don’t, if you bury your anger, and you brood on it and you resent the additional person or the attacker, and you don’t try to resolve the problem, then you’re in trouble,” he added.

Of the 192 couples studied, 26 pairs both suppressed their anger and there were 13 deaths in that group. In the remaining 166 pairs, there were 41 deaths combined. In 27 per cent of those couples who both concealed their anger, one member of the couple died during the study period, and in 23 per cent of those couples both died during the study period.

That’s compared to only six per cent of the couples where both spouses died in the remaining three groups joint. Only 19 per cent in the residual three groups combined saw one partner die during the study age. The paper, “wedded couple Anger cope type May do something as an Entity to Affect Mortality: Preliminary Findings from a Prospective Study” is in print in the Journal of Family Communication.

Share These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.