Happy Valentine’s Day.

HOW scientific are the “matching algorithms” of online-dating Web sites?

For a fee, many dating sites will collect data about you, crunch the numbers and match you with someone who, as eHarmony puts it, has been “prescreened for deep compatibility with you across 29 dimensions.” Sites like Chemistry, PerfectMatch and GenePartner make similar scientific-sounding claims.

But can a mathematical formula really identify pairs of singles who are especially likely to have a successful romantic relationship?

We believe the answer is no. It’s hard to be certain, since the sites have not disclosed their algorithms. But — as we and our co-authors argue in an article to be published this month in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest — the past 80 years of scientific research about what makes people romantically compatible suggests that such sites are unlikely to do what they claim to do.

One major problem is that these sites fail to collect a lot of crucial information. Because they gather data from singles who have never met, the sites have no way of knowing how two people will interact once they have been matched. Yet our review of the literature reveals that aspects of relationships that emerge only after two people meet and get to know each other — things like communication patterns, problem-solving tendencies and sexual compatibility — are crucial for predicting the success or failure of relationships. For example, study after study has shown that the way that couples discuss and attempt to resolve disagreements predicts their future satisfaction and whether or not the relationship is likely to dissolve.

Likewise, dating sites don’t take into account the environment surrounding the relationship: factors like job loss, financial strain, infertility and illness. But research indicates that when couples encounter such stresses or unexpected demands on their energy, their satisfaction with their relationship declines and their risk for breaking up increases. To give just one example: in a 2004 study by the psychologist Lisa Neff, wives who experienced relatively high levels of stress outside of their marriage tended to evaluate their marriage increasingly negatively over time.

Another major problem with the algorithms of dating sites is that the information that they do collect — about individual characteristics — accounts for only a tiny slice of what makes two people suited for a long-term relationship. Certainly, some characteristics predict relationship well-being. For example, decades of research confirms that people tend to have troubled romantic relationships if they are emotionally volatile, were mistreated as children or abuse drugs or alcohol. Eliminating people from the dating pool who are likely to have relationship problems, as some sites may do by declining customers based on their answers to questions about things like emotional stability, can be a useful service (as long as you’re one of the lucky singles who make the cut).

Of course, dating sites promise much more than access to a somewhat improved pool of potential mates; they promise to identify specific pairs of strangers who are likely to mesh well together in a romantic relationship. In particular, almost all of the sites claim that partners who are more similar to each other in certain ways will experience greater relationship satisfaction and stability relative to partners who are less similar.

But our review of the literature revealed that the forms of similarity advertised by dating sites provide a meager foundation for an enduring relationship. To be sure, similarity on some dimensions, like race and religion, does predict relationship well-being. Analyses by the National Center for Health Statistics, for example, indicate that marriages between spouses of the same race or ethnicity have a lower divorce rate after 10 years than interracial or interethnic couples (31 percent versus 41 percent). However, the vast majority of people mate with demographically similar partners anyway, so such findings aren’t especially useful in helping dating sites narrow a client’s pool of potential partners.

Perhaps as a result, these sites tend to emphasize similarity on psychological variables like personality (e.g., matching extroverts with extroverts and introverts with introverts) and attitudes (e.g., matching people who prefer Judd Apatow’s movies to Woody Allen’s with people who feel the same way). The problem with this approach is that such forms of similarity between two partners generally don’t predict the success of their relationship. According to a 2008 meta-analysis of 313 studies, similarity on personality traits and attitudes had no effect on relationship well-being in established relationships. In addition, a 2010 study of more than 23,000 married couples showed that similarity on the major dimensions of personality (e.g., neuroticism, impulsivity, extroversion) accounted for a mere 0.5 percent of how satisfied spouses were with their marriages — leaving the other 99.5 percent to other factors.

None of this suggests that online dating is any worse a method of meeting potential romantic partners than meeting in a bar or on the subway. But it’s no better either.

“The Dubious Science of Online Dating.”

What should you do to get ready for Valentine’s Day? According to YourTango, you should delete your ex-partner from your Facebook friends list. They have even designated a day for doing it; February 13^th is Break Up With Your Ex Day, and this means deleting, blocking, untagging, and unfollowing your ex from Facebook and other social media.

“Creeping” or “facestalking” an ex-partner is fairly common, at least among college students. In one study of undergraduate students, 67% reported monitoring their ex-partners on Facebook.¹ The idea behind this new Break Up With Your Ex Dayis that constant exposure to your ex-partners’ posts, photos, and status updates make it more difficult to get over them and open yourself up to a new potential Valentine. Is YourTango on to something here? Are we better off deleting our ex-partners from Facebook?

Although there is no direct research support for the benefits of deleting an ex from Facebook, interdependence theory² suggests that maintaining an investment in an ex-partner’s life may make it more difficult to commit to a new partner. If the perceived alternatives to your current relationship (e.g., reconciling with your ex-partner) are desirable, this will decrease your feelings of commitment toward your new partner. In addition, my research on Facebook jealousy finds that partners’ interactions with their past romantic or sexual partners on Facebook is one trigger of jealousy,³ an experience that often has negative consequences for relationships (see this post)

Additional research provides further support for the idea that staying friends after a break-up, especially if one person wants to get back together, may not be a good idea. If your partner rejected you and you are still hoping to rekindle the relationship, staying connected online may make it harder to move on. In one study, researchers took brain scans of men and women who were recently rejected by a romantic partner. Looking at a photograph of their previous partner triggered intense emotions. Participants reported feeling love for their partners when looking at the photo, but they also experienced agitation, anger, and despair; activation of specific areas in the brain were consistent with these self-reports.⁴ Viewing an ex-partner’s photo also activated areas of the brain associated with craving and addiction, suggesting that participants were thinking of their rejecter obsessively⁴ (which may make it difficult to avoid “creeping” them on Facebook).

So if you want to cleanse yourself for Valentine’s day, unfriend, unfollow and untag your ex-partner. We cannot guarantee that deleting your ex from Facebook will significantly improve your well-being, but it might free up some of your time.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

link: http://www.scienceofrelationships.com/home/2012/2/10/get-your-facebook-profile-ready-for-valentines-day.html

Some facts:

• introduced by Morgan and Murray in 1935
• purpose is to reveal patients’ basic personality characteristics through the interpretation of their imaginative productions in response to a series of pictures.
• designed to show central conflicts, attitudes, goals, and repressed material, however it actually produces material that is a collage of these as well as situational influences, cultural stereotypes, trivia, etc.
• most clinicians use this as a method for inferring psychological needs and of disclosing how the patient interacts with the environment
• 31 TAT cards (one is blank), most show people in a variety of situations, but a few contain just objects
• very difficult to evaluate the reliability and validity of the TAT in any sense—there are so many variations in instructions, methods of administration, number of cards used, and type of scoring system that hard conclusions are virtually impossible

Trull, T. J. (2005). Clinical psychology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.