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Men experience more emotional pain during breakups: Study
A new study looking at the state of online relationships has found that men are likely to experience more emotional pain as compared to women when they end up parting ways.
Washington [US]: A new study looking at the state of online relationships has found that men are likely to experience more emotional pain as compared to women when they end up parting ways.
The study and its results 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. The study began as an attempt to create a map of the most common relationship problems experienced by people outside of clinical and counselling settings.
"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 researchers were then able to statistically determine the most common themes that came up across each post, creating a "map" 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 discussing problems, and 1 in 8 mentioning trust issues in their relationships. Previously unexpected patterns emerged from the data as well, including key gender differences in which themes were used the most.
"As we were conducting the study, we realized that this was an important opportunity to put a lot of common ideas about gender differences in relationships to the test," said Dr Ryan Boyd, the lead researcher of the project. "For example, are men truly less emotionally invested in relationships than women or is it the case that men are simply stigmatized out of sharing their feelings?"
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 "heartache" and was comprised of words like regret, breakup, cry, and heartbroken.
Contrary to their expectations, the team's findings showed that men discuss heartbreak significantly more than did women. These findings suggest that the stereotype of men being less emotionally invested in relationships than women may not be accurate.(ANI)