A new study looking at the state of online relationships has found that men are likely to experience emotional pain as compared to women when they end up parting ways in a relationship. The results of the study have been published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
An international team of psychologists led by researchers at Lancaster University conducted the first-ever “big data” analysis of relationship problems. As an attempt to create a map of the most common relationship issues experienced by people outside of clinical and counselling set ups.
“Most of what we know about relationship problems comes from studies of people in couples therapy, which includes a rather specific subset of people — people who have the time, money, and motive to work on their relationship problems,” said Charlotte Entwistle, lead author of the study.
“We wanted to understand not only what relationship problems are most commonly experienced by the general public, but who experiences which problems more. “Using natural language processing methods, the team analyzed the demographic and psychological characteristics of over 184,000 people who posted their relationship problems to an anonymous online forum.
The experimenters were also suitable to statistically determine the most common themes that came up across each post, creating a” chart”of the most common relationship problems.
Results showed that communication problems were the# 1 most frequent problem mentioned, with nearly 1 in 5 people noting difficulty agitating problems, and 1 in 8 mentioning trust issues in their connections. Preliminarily unanticipated patterns surfaced from the data as well, including crucial gender differences in which themes were used the most.
“As we were conducting the study, we realized that this was an important occasion to put a lot of common ideas about gender differences in connections to the test,” said Dr Ryan Boyd, the supereminent experimenter of the design.”For illustration, are men truly less emotionally invested in connections than women, or is it the case that men are simply stigmatized out of participating their passions?”
Revolution Analysis revealed that the most common theme mentioned by people talking about their relationship problems was about the emotional pain caused by the problems, rather than the problems themselves.
The most common theme was about” heartbreak”and was comprised of words like remorse, bifurcation, cry, and agonized. Contrary to their prospects, the platoon’s findings showed that men bandy heartache significantly further than did women. These findings suggest that the conception of men being less emotionally invested in connections than women may not be accurate. Charlottle Entwistle said” Specially, the fact that the heartbreak theme was more generally bandied by men emphasizes how men are at least as emotionally affected by relationship problems as women.”
Also, the experimenters’ plant that men were more likely to seek relationship help than women in online settings.
Dr Ryan Boyd noted that”Traditionally, women are more likely to identify relationship problems, consider remedy, and seek remedy than are men. When you remove the traditional social spots against men for seeking help and participating their feelings, still, they feel just as invested in working through rough patches in their connections as women.
“The platoon’s findings have counteraccusations for the general public, as well as clinical settings. The experimenters noted that developing a more accurate picture of relationship problems helps us to more understand when and why effects go wrong in our connections, potentially helping couples avoid the most common lapses to romantic success.
The study’s authors also suggest the findings may also help to destigmatize help- seeking by showing how common numerous relationship problems are, and by showing that men are just as likely as women to seek help in the first place. The experimenters say that this work also points to important unborn directions for fresh exploration.
“One of the most important things that we’re seeing here is that we’re able to create an incredibly accurate picture of relationship problems that everyday people face based purely on what people say online,” said Dr Boyd. “This gives us serious hope that we can use help-seeking behaviour to better understand all types of social and psychological issues, and in a way that we simply cannot do using traditional research methods.”
