<i></i> <i></i> <i></i> 0<p><img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/c-users-zainab-afridi-downloads-20-10-2395-1-jpg.jpeg"/></p> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1427.jpeg"/>Tapoos.com <p>Marriage is a wonderful thing to happen. It is the ultimate source of social support that an individual can receive as an adult. People marry to spend a lifetime with someone they love and to build a family with them. No one marries with the purpose of getting divorced. Divorce happens. When our pre-conceived notions about marriage don’t come true, partners don’t get along like they used to or, the popular phrase, when ‘life happens’ divorce also happens.</p> <p>Various studies, population based, have discovered that most adults will marry at one point or another in their life. According to The Origins of Modern Divorce, divorce rates have been on the high since the middle of the 20th century, despite the overall benefits of marriage that partners agree to. While no one can point out a singular reason as to why divorce happens, lately a narrative has emerged which hypothesizes that the desire to get married and then get divorced could very well be in our genes. A genetic analysis by Johnsons and colleagues (2004), found considerable evidence supporting the desire of getting married over the span of one’s life stemming from genetic influences. Another study determines that the desire to get married is at its highest during the mid-life period of an individual but decreases as they get older. Divorce, like the desire to be married, has also been found due to hereditary.</p> <p>While scientists had speculated at the connection between divorce and genetics towards the end of the twentieth century, the proof comes now in a groundbreaking study ‘Genetics, the Rearing Environment, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Divorce: A Swedish National Adoption Study’ carried out by Professor Jessica Salvatore, Ph.D., assistant professor in Department of Psychology in the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University.</p> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1428.jpeg"/>Tapoos.com <p>The study is the largest of its kind ever conducted with a sample size of nearly 20,000 individuals of which nearly 46% went through divorce as adults. The research provides ample proof that children of divorced parents have an increased probability of getting divorced themselves, and their genes are the primary factor behind this.</p> <p>According to this study, soon to be published by the journal of Psychological Science, divorce happens because there are certain genes at play. “We were trying to answer the basic question: Why does divorce run in families?” says the study’s first author, Dr. Salvatore, “Across a series of designs using Swedish national registry data, we found consistent evidence that genetic factors primarily explained the intergenerational transmission of divorce.”</p> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1429.jpeg"/>Tapoos.com <p>In addition to Salvatore, the study was conducted with Kenneth S. Kendler, M.D., professor of psychiatry and human and molecular genetics in the Department of Psychiatry at VCU’s School of Medicine, along with Swedish colleagues Sara Larsson Lönn, Ph.D.; Jan Sundquist, M.D., Ph.D.; and Kristina Sundquist, M.D., Ph.D., of the Center for Primary Health Care Research at Lund University.</p> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1430.jpeg"/>Tapoos.com <p>Up until this point, it was believed that the tendency to divorce is transmitted from one generation to the next due to psychological factors. The idea behind this thought is that since children grow up in a troubled environment, they might internalize that behavior and accept it as a norm. These children would then grow up to replicate the same lack of commitment and interpersonal skills in their own relationship. Hence, the psychology of divorce.</p> <p>“I see this as a quite significant finding. Nearly all the prior literature emphasized that divorce was transmitted across generations psychologically,” said Kenneth S. Kendler, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and human and molecular genetics at VCU who was also involved with the study. “Our results contradict that, suggesting that genetic factors are more important.”</p> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1431.jpeg"/>Tapoos.com <p>“We do know that divorce is what we call a heritable trait, meaning that genes influence it,” says Dr. Salvatore. She explains that it is still unclear as to which particular genes or genetic variants contribute towards making divorce a heritable character. It is more complicated than simply pointing at a particular genetic code or strand and putting all the blame on it.</p> <p>Genes make your personality. And your personality is what makes you, you. These sets of genes, or genotypes, which make divorce heritable, also contribute towards building particular personality traits which can be related to divorce. For example, consider the Big Five Higher Personality Traits:</p> Extroversion: sociable, assertive, merry, articulate, talkative, friendly, socially confident Agreeableness: tactful, polite, kind, patient, trusting, modest, altruistic, amiable, cheerful Conscientiousness: ambitious, consistent, predictable, reliable, hardworking, resourceful, energetic, and thorough Neuroticism: moody, jealous, pessimistic, nervous, anxious, timid, insecure, oversensitive, awkward Openness to experience: imaginative, insightful, clever, curious, intellectual, creative, deep, complex, daring. <p>Your genetics play a fundamental role in defining your personality and its traits. Whether you are less assertive, more insecure, very jealous, hardly tactful, impatient or insightful in your marital relationship are all tweaking made by your genetic code.</p> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1432.jpeg"/>Tapoos.com <p>Dr. Salvatore explains this as, “Something like neuroticism, that’s someone’s proneness to negative affective states, things like anxiety and worry. And we know from more clinical, laboratory-based studies of couples, that when someone is high in neuroticism, they tend to see their partner’s behavior as more negative than an objective observer views that same type of behavior. This can really lead to a pernicious or damaging cycle within a relationship because that can be hard to please a partner when everything you do is disappointing. So these types of personality-driven cognitive distortions I think make a really high potential target for therapeutic intervention for distressed couples.”</p> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1433.jpeg"/>Tapoos.com <p>The study observed divorce patterns in Swedish population registries and focused on adopted children in their adoptive families who had biologically divorced parents. By doing so, it becomes very easy to isolate environmental influences from biological and genetic ones. “That’s because what we’re looking at in an adoption study is whether the adoptees resemble either their biological parents, who contribute genes,” says Dr. Salvatore, “Or their adoptive parents, who contribute the rearing environment.” Comparisons were formulated between adoptees and their biological parents’ divorces to adoptees and their adoptive parents’ divorces. As most of these adoptees were put up for adoption at just weeks’ old; hence they did not experience their parents’ marriage dissolution.</p> <h2>Astounding Findings:</h2> <p>So far, the interpretations and evidence from previous studies have shown that divorce is an environmental influence and psychological damage resulting from watching your parents ending their marriage. However, Dr. Salvator’s study determines that, “the adoptees tended to resemble their biological parents, who contributed genes to the adoptees, and not their adoptive parents who contributed the rearing environment.” This concurs that the transmission of divorce through generations is a result of genetic influence rather than the rearing environment.</p> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1434.jpeg"/>Tapoos.com <p>The research isolates genes as the major contributor towards divorce influences. However, it also takes into account other factors like environment, the traits, personality and liabilities of both the partners and how they merge in a relationship. Marriage and divorce are between two people, each of whom brings their own cocktail mix to the table. Genetic influence makes up a huge part of the bigger picture and appears to be the primary explanation of why divorce seems to run through generations in some families.</p> <h2>Impact of the study on marriage counseling</h2> <p>“Divorcing parents not only are giving a ‘divorced environment’ to their children they’re also contributing genes to their offspring,” determines Dr. Salvatore. Based on this study, marriage counselors and therapists can adjust and tweak their strategies accordingly. So instead of putting more focus on areas like interpersonal communication, compromise techniques and commitment issues, these counselors could include other factors as well. This would include isolating each individual’s personality traits and examining them to see where the problems arise from.</p> <img src="https://cdnone.netlify.com/db/2017/10/word-image-1435.jpeg"/>Tapoos.com <p>“Just because something is genetically influenced doesn’t mean that it isn’t modifiable,” says Dr. Salvatore, “If someone knows what their liabilities are, certainly those things are amenable to being changed, they’re open to environmental influence.”</p> <p>This study could potentially change the attitudes, methodologies and approaches towards marriage and couples counseling forever. It would also help yield better outcomes for the individuals involved. Once you know where the problem truly lies then you can make diligent efforts to work on them and bring about a positive result.</p> <i></i>