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(READING 2)
Divorce: A Fifty-Fifty Chance?
Divorce is a growing problem in the United States and many other
developed countries. Although thousands and thousands of happy couples
get married every year, more than 50 percent of them get divorced. Two
researchers at the University of Washington studied marriage and divorce .
They learned a lot from their research. With this information, they created
a mathematical formula that predicts divorce . Mathematician James Murray
and psychologist John Gottman agree that their predictions are correct
almost all of the time.
How do they do it?
A husband and wife talk about a difficult subject for 15 minutes. The
researchers videotape them. In addition, they record physical information
such as heart rate. Then the researchers listen to the conversation. They
watch the body language and look at the facial reactions. After that, they
give the couple positive and negative points.
For example, the couple might talk about mothers-in-law. If the
husband says, "Your mother is a lot of trouble:' the couple gets two
negative points. If the wife rolls her eyes, they get two more negative points.
However, if the husband says, "Your mother is a lot of trouble, but
sometimes she's funny:' then the couple gets one positive point. If he
smiles, they get another one.
In the end, the researchers add up the points. A good marriage has five
more positive points than negative points. However, the researchers say that
a bad score is not necessarily the end of a marriage. Marriages with bad
scores can survive. They hope that couples will use the information from
the study to learn to communicate. However, not everyone believes that
mathematics can stop divorce. A professor of psychology at New York
University says that it is "absolutely impossible" to use mathematics to help
a marriage. The scientists disagree. They have studied this problem for 16
years. In that time, they have studied more than 700 couples. Their
predictions are 94 percent accurate. It seems necessary for the survival of
marriage that we listen to them.
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