Married Couples
Robert Levenson, Ph.D., researches human psychophysiology. Levenson uses longitudinal studies of married couples' physiological responses. He measures how empathy requires a calm and receptive emotional environment for the couple to be in physiological sync. When an emotional hijacking is taking place (anger or argument) empathy declines and the cognitions of the spouse are blocked.
Read more about this topic: Emotional Contagion
Famous quotes containing the words married and/or couples:
“Love is a blazing, crackling, green-wood flame, as much smoke as flame; friendship, married friendship particularly, is a steady, intense, comfortable fire. Love, in courtship, is friendship in hope; in matrimony, friendship upon proof.”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“A whole village-full of sensuous emotion, scattered abroad all the year long, surged here in a focus for an hour. The forty hearts of those waving couples were beating as they had not done since, twelve months before, they had come together in similar jollity. For the time Paganism was revived in their hearts, the pride of life was all in all, and they adored none other than themselves.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)