Physiological Responses to Movies Predict Marital Satisfaction

People perceive psychological characteristics (PCs), such as the personality and values of a marriage partner, as extremely important factors in partner selection. Due to its importance, considerable work has investigated the relationship between couples’ PCs and their marital satisfaction, and their findings have been adopted by matchmaking services. However, these studies and services have determined the PCs using self-report questionnaires, in which the resulting measurements have limited amount of information and various biases, and thus, have limited predictive utility for marital satisfaction. Given this, we examined the predictive utility of brain and cardiac responses, which are known to correlate with PCs, providing information that are very different in nature and quality from what a questionnaire measures and present fewer biases. We collected the EEG and ECG data of 51 married couples while they watched a set of preselected movies and examined the association between their physiological measurements and marital satisfaction. Performing regression analyses, we confirmed that the brain and cardiac responses to the movies have significant predictive utility for marital satisfaction. When we used these physiological responses to one of the movies in the models, the prediction error for male and female marital satisfaction was reduced by an average of 19.0% and 10.1% in terms of RMSE, respectively, compared to baseline models that used only the questionnaire measurements of psychological characteristics.