Research Design in Clinical Psychology

But that same tape has been given to almost two hundred marital therapists, marital researchers, pastoral counselors, and graduate students in clinical psychology, as well as newlyweds, people who were recently divorced, and people who have been happily married for a long timeБЂ”in other words, almost two hundred people who know a good deal more about marriage than I doБЂ”and none of them was any better than I was. The group as a whole guessed right 53.8 percent of the time, which is just above chance. The fact that there was a pattern didnБЂ™t much matter. There were so many other things going on so quickly in those three minutes that we couldnБЂ™t find the pattern. Gottman, however, doesnБЂ™t have this problem. HeБЂ™s gotten so good at thin-slicing marriages that he says he can be in a restaurant and eavesdrop on the couple one table over and get a pretty good sense of whether they need to start thinking about hiring lawyers and dividing up custody of the children. How does he do it? He has figured out that he doesnБЂ™t need to pay attention to everything that happens ...»