Yong-Long Lai

Read this book called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell recently

he talks about something developed by John M. Gottman, PhD.

“He’s gotten so good at thin-slicing marriages that he says he can be in a restaurant and eavesdrop on the couple one table over and get a pretty good sense of whether they need to start thinking about hiring lawyers and dividing up custody of the children.”

Gottman talks about the 4 Horsemen in a relationship from his thin-slicing work

1. Stonewalling
2. Criticism
3. Defensiveness
4. Contempt

here’s a snippet from the book:
http://www.enotalone.com/article/3938.html

In summary, the 4 horsemen highlights some of the important driving forces of relationship breakdown to watch out for:

• Contempt is the worse of the 4 horsemen because it does long term damage to the relationship
• Females usually criticises
• Males usually stone walls
• Both females & males do contempt
• Criticism usually leads to the other party becoming defensive (which will lead into a vicious cycle)
• Stone walling usually leads to more criticism (which will lead into a vicious cycle)