Psychologist and top marriage guru John Gottman has spent twenty years studying what makes a marriage last - now you can use his tested methods to evaluate, strengthen and maintain your long-term relationship. This ground-breaking book will enable you to see where your strengths and weaknesses lie, what specific actions you can take to improve your marriage and how to avoid the damaging patterns that can lead to divorce. It includes: * Practical exercises and techniques that will allow you to understand and make the most of your relationship * Ways to recognise and overcome the attitudes that doom a marriage * Questionnaires that will help you evaluate your relationship * Case studies and anecdotes from real life throughout

For the past thirty-five years, John Gottman's research has been internationally recognized for its unprecedented ability to precisely measure interactive processes in couples and to predict the long-term success or failure of relationships. In this groundbreaking book, he presents a new approach to understanding and changing couples: a fundamental social skill called "emotional attunement," which describes a couple's ability to fully process and move on from negative emotional events, ultimately creating a stronger relationship. Gottman draws from this longitudinal research and theory to show how emotional attunement can downregulate negative affect, help couples focus on positive traits and memories, and even help prevent domestic violence. He offers a detailed intervention devised to cultivate attunement, thereby helping couples connect, respect, and show affection. Emotional attunement is extended to tackle the subjects of flooding, the story we tell ourselves about our relationship, conflict, personality, changing relationships, and gender. Gottman also explains how to create emotional attunement when it is missing, to lay a foundation that will carry the relationship through difficult times. Gottman encourages couples to cultivate attunement through awareness, tolerance, understanding, non-defensive listening, and empathy. These qualities, he argues, inspire confidence in couples, and the sense that despite the inevitable struggles, the relationship is enduring and resilient. This book, an essential follow-up to his 1999 The Marriage Clinic, offers therapists, students, and researchers detailed intervention for working with couples, and offers couples a roadmap to a stronger future together.

Here, two of the world's leading couple therapists give readers an inside tour of what goes on in the consulting rooms of their practice. They have been doing couples work for decades and still find it challenging. This book gathers together what they have learned over the years of their practice and touches on issues at the core of couples work. No-one who works with couples will want to be without the insight, guidance and strategies offered in this book.

World renowned for their work on divorce prediction, here John M. and Julie Schwartz Gottman examine a couples therapy classic: Ludwig von Bertalanffy's 1968 collection General System Theory. This book transformed therapy, but until now there hasn't been a researched-based demonstration that these ideas work. Using the latest research tools, the Gottmans complete the promise of this early work.

Here one will find not only a wide range of succinct and useful assessment procedures, but also a highly specific, research-based, and modularized treatment program. In addition, there are dozens of questionnaires and interview protocols to be used in both assessment and intervention. In prospective, long-term research with over 700 couples, Gottman has discovered certain factors that distinguish happy, stable couples from both unstable, ultimately divorcing couples and stable but unhappy couples. These findings, which are explained here in understandable, nontechnical language, form the basis of his Sound Marital House theory of marriage, which guides the new therapy. This therapy has two goals: changing the marital friendship and teaching couples to regulate conflict. Despite the high aims of much marital therapy, Gottman found that most marital conflicts involve fundamentally unresolvable relationship issues called "perpetual problems." He shows how therapists can help spouses move from gridlock to dialogue on these issues. Solvable problems can be resolved more easily when the couple has a strong marital friendship. He gives therapists the tools to teach spouses five fundamental skills to develop and strengthen their friendship: softened start-up, accepting influence, repair and de-escalation, compromise, and physiological soothing. Gottman compares his clinic to a restaurant, where clients are offered a menu of treatment formats, from psychoeducation for specific issues to extended therapy to repair a badly damaged marital friendship. Therapists, too, can choose among the questionnaires and strategies for those that fit the needs of particular couples. Whatever their choice, they will find that their practice is greatly enriched by the scientifically-based offerings of The Marriage Clinic.

Hailed as a landmark in the development of experimental methods when it appeared in 1975, Design and Analysis of Time-Series Experiments is available again after several years of being out of print. Gene V Glass, Victor L. Willson and John M. Gottman have carried forward the design and analysis of perhaps the most powerful and useful quasi-experimental design identified by their mentors in the classic Campbell & Stanley text Experimental and Quasi-experimental Design for Research (1966). In an era when governments seek to resolve questions of experimental validity by fiat and the label ""Scientifically Based Research"" is appropriated for only certain privileged experimental designs, nothing could be more appropriate than to bring back the classic text that challenges doctrinaire opinions of proper causal analysis. Glass, Willson & Gottman introduce and illustrate an armamentarium of interrupted time-series experimental designs that offer some of the most powerful tools for discovering and validating causal relationships in social and education policy analysis.Drawing on the ground-breaking statistical analytic tools of Box & Jenkins, the authors extend the comprehensive autoregressive-integrated-movingaverages (ARIMA) model to accommodate significance testing and estimation of the effects of interventions into real world time-series. Designs and full statistical analyses are richly illustrated with actual examples from education, behavioral psychology, and sociology.

Divorce rates are at an all-time high. But without a theoretical understanding of the processes related to marital stability and dissolution, it is difficult to design and evaluate new marriage interventions. The Mathematics of Marriage provides the foundation for a scientific theory of marital relations. The book does not rely on metaphors, but develops and applies a mathematical model using difference equations. The work is the fulfillment of the goal to build a mathematical framework for the general system theory of families first suggested by Ludwig Von Bertalanffy in the 1960s.The book also presents a complete introduction to the mathematics involved in theory building and testing, and details the development of experiments and models. In one "marriage experiment," for example, the authors explored the effects of lowering or raising a couple's heart rates. Armed with their mathematical model, they were able to do real experiments to determine which processes were affected by their interventions.Applying ideas such as phase space, null clines, influence functions, inertia, and uninfluenced and influenced stable steady states (attractors), the authors show how other researchers can use the methods to weigh their own data with positive and negative weights. While the focus is on modeling marriage, the techniques can be applied to other types of psychological phenomena as well.

Since the 1970s social scientists and scientists in a variety of fields - psychology, sociology, education, psychiatry, economics and engineering - have been interested in problems that require the statistical analysis of data over time and there has been in effect a conceptual revolution in ways of thinking about pattern and regularity. This book is a comprehensive introduction to all the major time-series techniques, both time-domain and frequency-domain. It includes work on linear models that simplify the solution of univariate and multivariate problems. The author begins with a non-mathematical overview: throughout, he provides easy-to-understand, fully worked examples drawn from real studies in psychology and sociology. Other, less comprehensive, books on time-series analysis require calculus: this presupposes only a standard introductory statistics course covering analysis of variance and regression. The chapters are short, designed to build concepts (and the reader's confidence) one step at a time. Many illustrations aid visual, intuitive understanding. Without compromising mathematical rigour, the author keeps in mind the reader who does no have an easy time with mathematics: the result is a readily accessible and practical text.

Mothers and infants exchanging gleeful vocalizations, married couples discussing their problems, children playing, birds courting, and monkeys fighting all have this in common: their interactions unfold over time. Almost anyone who is interested can observe and describe such phenomena. However, scientists usually demand more than a desription--they want observations that are replicable and amenable to scientific analysis, while still faithful to the dynamics of the phenomena studied. This book provides a straightforward introduction to scientific methods for observing social behavior. The second edition clarifies and extends material from the first edition, especially with respect to data analysis. A common standard for sequential data is introduced and sequential analysis is placed on firmer, log-linear statistical footing. The second edition is designed to work as a companion volume to Analyzing Interaction (1995). Because of the importance of time in the dynamics of social interaction, sequential approaches to analyzing and understanding social behavior are emphasized. An advanced knowledge of statistical analysis is not required. Instead, the authors present fundamental concepts and offer practical advice.

Mothers and infants exchanging gleeful vocalizations, married couples discussing their problems, children playing, birds courting, and monkeys fighting all have this in common: their interactions unfold over time. Almost anyone who is interested can observe and describe such phenomena. However, scientists usually demand more than a desription--they want observations that are replicable and amenable to scientific analysis, while still faithful to the dynamics of the phenomena studied. This book provides a straightforward introduction to scientific methods for observing social behavior. The second edition clarifies and extends material from the first edition, especially with respect to data analysis. A common standard for sequential data is introduced and sequential analysis is placed on firmer, log-linear statistical footing. The second edition is designed to work as a companion volume to Analyzing Interaction (1995). Because of the importance of time in the dynamics of social interaction, sequential approaches to analyzing and understanding social behavior are emphasized. An advanced knowledge of statistical analysis is not required. Instead, the authors present fundamental concepts and offer practical advice.

When this book was first published in 1978, it was only recently that researchers had begun to focus on children's peer relationships and the impact of these relationships on their development. The contributors to this volume view friendship as an important context for the study of a variety of cognitive and affective processes - from the perspectives of a wide range of disciplines. The volume poses an array of fascinating theoretical questions, and offers varied methodological tools for answering them. Some contributors present and review applied research addressed to conceptualizing and ameliorating peer relationship problems, whilst others reflect applied or policy-orientated concerns in chapters on racial integration and the integration of mentally retarded children into regular classrooms. A chapter on the scientific, political and social history of the interest in children's friendships and two summary chapters add to the usefulness of the book for students.