In 2006, I co-authored a permanent exhibit at the San Francisco Exploratorium called The Sounds of Conflict. It has been in the museum's permanent collection ever since — which means that for nearly twenty years, Exploratorium visitors have been encountering the research on what goes wrong in intimate relationships in an interactive, experiential format.
What the Research Actually Shows
The exhibit was built on John Gottman's observational studies of couples — research conducted at the University of Washington's "Love Lab," where couples were brought in to discuss a topic of ongoing disagreement while their physiology, facial behavior, and vocal patterns were recorded and coded.
What Gottman and his colleagues found was that the content of what couples argued about had virtually no predictive relationship with whether those couples would eventually divorce. What did predict divorce — with striking accuracy, years in advance — was the process: how they argued. Specifically, the presence of what Gottman called the Four Horsemen: contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling.
Of these, contempt is the most destructive by a wide margin. Contempt — the expression of moral superiority, the eye-roll, the sneer — is in Gottman's data the single strongest predictor of relationship dissolution.
What FACS Reveals
My training in FACS — the Facial Action Coding System developed by Paul Ekman — gave me the ability to see contempt at the level of individual muscle movements. The specific combination is the unilateral lip corner pull: one corner of the lip curled upward, asymmetrically, while the other remains neutral. At full intensity it is obvious. At low intensity it passes unnoticed — except that the partner receiving it usually registers it, physiologically if not consciously, within fractions of a second.
Partners in distressed relationships often cannot articulate why they feel unsafe or unrespected in their interactions. But their bodies know. Their heart rate is elevated. Their cortisol is rising. They are in a defensive physiological state — which is precisely the state in which connection is most difficult and escalation is most likely.
What I Carry Into the Room
Almost twenty years of clinical practice later, the research background still shapes how I work. I notice facial behavior. I notice the unilateral lip curl and what it does to the partner receiving it. I notice when someone's voice goes flat — the monotone that research has repeatedly associated with contemptuous emotional withdrawal.
The museum exhibit asked visitors: what do you see in these faces? That question turns out to be the right one for therapy too.