Electric Josh

Wimmen
The Chronicle of Higher Education (via boingboing, I think) reports on a professor of psychology at the University of Washington (whose kind of measly academic web page is here, but who seems to have his very own institute---wehehell...!) who can determine with some mathematical accuracy whether couples will remain couples.

What the students were modeling in that lounge was not "marriage" per se, but the dynamics of marital conversations. Before looking at data from any real-world couples, they began with some very simple hypotheses: the idea, for example, that spouses will react emotionally to the most recent comment made by their partners. At this early stage they sketched crude "influence functions" -- calculus equations that described a dynamic system in which a snarky comment by one spouse would result in negative emotions in the partner, sometimes resulting in a downward spiral. When they tested those first equations against the Love Lab's data, however, they did not match at all.

The scholars soon realized that they needed to add a constant that represented each partner's "uninfluenced steady state" -- that is, the person's general level of cheerfulness or gloom, independent of the spouse's behavior on a particular day. "In retrospect, we should have thought of that at the very beginning," says Mr. Murray. "But once we added that constant, everything fell in just beautifully."

The researchers now had equations that fit Mr. Gottman's data quite closely. They used these to develop bilinear influence functions, which describe a person's ability to affect his or her spouse's mood. Some couples, which Mr. Gottman calls "volatile," routinely unleash anger at one another -- but offset that anger with even larger doses of warm feelings. Those couples tend to be stable and successful, Mr. Gottman says, because they are able to influence one another with both anger and affection. (The influence functions of "conflict avoiding" couples look very different.)

I took a course at UVM that was taught out of the Mathematical Biology book the article describes, and it's the kind of book that makes it just totally obvious that every kid in America should be forced to understand calculus and basic differential equations in order to graduate from high school. Once I dig the text out of the basement I'll post the example question that got the good doctors' collaboration started. Fascinating stuff, here.
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