July 15th, 2009 
Yong-Long Lai Read this book called
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
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
- Stonewalling
- Criticism
- Defensiveness
- 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)
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