Neural synchronization predicts marital satisfaction

Abstract

Marital attachment plays an important role in maintaining intimate personal relationships and sustaining psychological well-being. Mate-selection theories suggest that people are more likely to marry someone with a similar personality and social status, yet evidence for the association between personality-based couple similarity measures and marital satisfaction has been inconsistent. A more direct and useful approach for understanding fundamental processes underlying marital satisfaction is to probe similarity of dynamic brain responses to maritally and socially relevant communicative cues, which may better reflect how married couples process information in real time and make sense of their mates and themselves. Here, we investigate shared neural representations based on intersubject synchronization (ISS) of brain responses during free viewing of marital life-related, and nonmarital, object-related movies. Compared to randomly selected pairs of couples, married couples showed significantly higher levels of ISS during viewing of marital movies and ISS between married couples predicted higher levels of marital satisfaction. ISS in the default mode network emerged as a strong predictor of marital satisfaction and canonical correlation analysis revealed a specific relation between ISS in this network and shared communication and egalitarian components of martial satisfaction. Our findings demonstrate that brain similarities that reflect real-time mental responses to subjective perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about interpersonal and social interactions are strong predictors of marital satisfaction, reflecting shared values and beliefs. Our study advances foundational knowledge of the neurobiological basis of human pair bonding.

Increased Interpersonal Brain Synchronization in Romantic Couples Is Associated with Higher Honesty: An fNIRS Hyperscanning Study

“…Recently, studies have suggested that IBS, as a dual-brain neural mechanism, plays an important role in the generation and maintenance of romantic relationships. Specifically, in a speed-dating task, IBS predicted the outcome of mate choice [86], and for couples in long-term marriages, IBS strongly predicted marital satisfaction when they watched marital movies [87]. We hypothesize that IBS in those studies was the biological basis for affective bonds.…”

Harmonious Husband and Wife Relationship:

“…Negative feelings that arise will have the effect of anger, dislike, and distance from each other (Olson et al, 2014). Added by Li et al (2022) subjective perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about interpersonal and social interactions are strong predictors of marital satisfaction. Therefore, differences in relationship satisfaction need to be discussed with the partner so that the husband and wife understand each other's wants and needs (Aman et al, 2019).…”

“…When positive feelings arise in a married couple, it will have the effect of happiness, satisfaction, and pleasant experiences carried out together (Olson et al, 2014;Rusbult & Buunk, 1993) and vice versa when negative feelings arise it will have the effect of anger, dislike, and distance from each other. In 2022, (Li et al, 2022) examined marriage satisfaction predicted using neural synchronization. Based on intersubject synchronization (ISS) of brain responses during watching movies related to married life, and movies that are not related to married life.…”

Early maladaptive schemas and the quality of marital bond and communication

“…According to Szopiński (1980), marital interactions realised in these three dimensions create a common, threefold psychological quality in the form of: co-understanding, co-feeling and co-acting, which, remaining in feedback, make the psychological experiences of one spouse become part of the experiences of the other (cf. e.g., Li et al, 2022).…”