by Purple Doodles

Created on: February 20, 2008

Complaining has been a deep-seated, long-standing and seemingly never-ending facet of the human psyche. Is that why a study of psychology is also essentially a study of complaints and complaints resolution?

Psychology has always focused on understanding the bad rather than the good. Think about this. Czapinski, in 1985 coded more than 17,000 research articles in psychology journals and found that the coverage of negative issues and phenomena exceeded positive, good ones 69% to 31% - a bias that was fairly strong across all areas of psychology. We have more words in every language to describe a complaint than describe something praiseworthy. Mankind sure has been paranoid about the negative.

If psychology has been the one science that has been trying to help man sort through his relationship concerns, then its goal has invariably been to move states from negative to neutral. Maybe we have been studying unpleasant things because man has been more paranoid about avoiding the bad rather than embracing the good. Hasn't fight or flight' been a basic human reaction?

Why have we been so obsessed with fixing the complaints and the negatives? Have we never found a good reason to focus on anything else? Are we not aware of what good can come out of focusing on the good rather than on the bad?

Well, It is about time we did that. Consider this wonderful piece of research by a renowned psychologist called Dr. John Gottman. Gottman is widely known for his work in the area of relationship analysis and counseling through scientific direct observations. He developed an index in 1994 called the Gottman index, which is now widely used in relationship therapy and couple counseling. His research says that the ratio of positive to negative communication in a relationship has to be 5:1; otherwise, the relationship is not likely to be stable. Doesn't this prove the power of the good over the bad?

Moreover, through his earlier study of married couple's interactions in 1979, he showed that positive and negative communications have different impacts on relationship satisfaction. He concluded that positivity and negativity were independent, in the sense that increasing one did not necessarily decrease the other.

The implication of this conclusion can be huge. We have always been trying to become good by reducing the amount of bad. That is perhaps why we have continued our complaining tendency in relationships with the hope that complaining will lead to a reduction of complains and the setting

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