How the marriage flame can be rekindled by looking at cute animals

If you want to rekindle the marriage spark, scientists say that you should try looking together at cute animals.

Even in happy relationships, passion seems to cool over time but psychologists from Florida State came up with a unique intervention to help couples keep the flame burning bright.

In a new study, a team of psychological scientists led by James K. McNulty, argues that looking at pictures of puppies and bunnies can help improve marital satisfaction.

According to the psychologists, even thou everyday behaviour stays the same, over time, marriage satisfaction starts to drop. This led McNulty and colleagues to hypothesise that an intervention focused on changing someone’s thoughts about their spouse, as opposed to one that targets their behaviours, might improve relationship quality.

Practically, McNulty focused on devising new associations when it comes to thinking about one’s spouse. It is similar to the now world-famous experiments conducted by Pavlov. By linking a very positive stimulus to an unrelated one, over time, you can create a positive association, McNulty theorised.

“One ultimate source of our feelings about our relationships can be reduced to how we associate our partners with positive affect, and those associations can come from our partners but also from unrelated things, like puppies and bunnies,” McNulty explained.

McNulty and his team registered 144 married couples, all under the age of 40 and married for less than 5 years for his experiment. On average, participants were around 28 years old and around 40% of the couples had children.

What the scientists did was to rely on what psychologists call evaluative conditioning. McNulty paired positive words and images of bunnies and puppies with the images of one’s spouse, in order to create a positive association between the image of the spouse and the feeling stirred up by the cute animals.

Each spouse was asked to individually view a brief stream of images once every 3 days for 6 weeks. While one group had their spouses’ images linked to positive stimuli, another control group had the images of their spouses linked to neutral elements.

After evaluating the couples before and after the experiment, the results showed that participants who were exposed to positive images paired with their partner’s face showed more positive automatic reactions to their partner over the course of the intervention compared with those who saw neutral pairings. And these positive automatic reactions led to higher marital satisfaction.

And if this sound unlikely, the scientists themselves were surprised that it worked.

“I was actually a little surprised that it worked,” McNulty explained. “All the theory I reviewed on evaluative conditioning suggested it should, but existing theories of relationships, and just the idea that something so simple and unrelated to marriage could affect how people feel about their marriage, made me sceptical.”

The scientists highlighted that pictures of cute animals cannot overcome difficulties relating to everyday behaviour and interactions between spouses are still the most important factor when it comes to marriage satisfaction.

However, the new findings suggest that a brief intervention focused on automatic attitudes could be useful as one aspect of marriage counselling or as a resource for couples in difficult long-distance situations, such as soldiers.

“The research was actually prompted by a grant from the Department of Defense – I was asked to conceptualise and test a brief way to help married couples cope with the stress of separation and deployment,” McNulty said. “We would really like to develop a procedure that could help soldiers and other people in situations that are challenging for relationships.”

So for couples that feel that the only thing that changed is the intensity of the flame, McNulty’s bunnies and puppies therapy tool could prove to be a marriage saver.