A good argument with your
spouse could be just what the doctor ordered. Preliminary results from a survey of married
couples suggest that disputing
husbands and wives who hold in their
anger die earlier than expressive couples.
"When couples get together, one of their main jobs is reconciliation about
conflict," said researcher Ernest Harburg, professor emeritus with the University of Michigan
School of Public Health and Psychology Department. "Usually nobody is
trained to do this. If they have good parents, they can imitate, that''s fine,
but usually the
couple is ignorant about the process of resolving conflict."
So while
conflict is inevitable, the critical matter is how couples resolve it.
"The key matter is, when the conflict happens, how do you resolve it?"
Harburg said. "When you don''t, if you bury your anger, and you brood on it and
you resent the other person or the attacker, and you don''t try to resolve the
problem, then you''re in trouble."
The findings add to past research showing that the release of anger can be
healthy. For instance, one study revealed when people are angry they tend to make better decisions, perhaps
because this emotion triggers the brain to ignore irrelevant cues and focus on
the meat of the matter. Individuals who express anger might also have a sense of
control and optimism over a situation, according to another past
study.
Bottled anger adds to stress, which tends to shorten lives, many studies
show.
In the current study, the authors suggest a combination of factors to explain
the higher mortality for couples who don''t express their anger. These include
"mutual anger suppression, poor communication (of feelings and issues) and poor
problem-solving with medical consequences," they write in the January issue of
the Journal of Family Communication.
Over a 17-year period, Harburg and his colleagues studied 192 married couples
in which spouses ranged in age from 35 to 69, focusing on aggressive behavior
considered unfair or undeserved by the person being "attacked." Harburg said
that if an attack is viewed as fair, the victim doesn''t tend to get angry.
Based on the participants'' anger-coping responses to hypothetical situations,
Harburg placed couples into one of four categories: both partners express their
anger; the wife expresses anger; the husband communicates anger while the other
suppresses; and both the husband and wife brood and suppress their anger.
The researchers found that 26 couples, meaning 52 individuals, were
suppressors in which both partners held in their anger. Twenty-five
percent of
the suppressors
died during the study period compared with about 12 percent for
the other remaining couples.
In 27 percent of the suppressor couples, one member of the couple died during
the study period, and in 23 percent of those couples, both died during the study
period. That''s compared to only 6 percent of couples where both spouses died in
the remaining three groups combined. Only 19 percent in the remaining three
groups combined saw one partner die during the study period.
The results held even when other health factors were accounted for, including
age, smoking, weight, blood pressure, bronchial problems, breathing and
cardiovascular risk.
Harburg said the results are preliminary, and his team is now collecting
30-year follow-up data. He expects the follow-up to show almost double the death
rate compared with the preliminary findings.
More summaries about the Spouses who fight live longer