Our sources
This site describes a communication pattern. Where a page leans on research rather than on plain description, it names the work in the sentence and links it, so you can go and read what it actually says instead of taking our word for the summary. Everything linked that way is listed below.
Works cited on this site
- Reading emotions from faces in two indigenous societies (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General)
- The relationship among expressions, labels, and descriptions of contempt (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)
- Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love
- The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Pattern of Intimate Relationships
- On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: a meta-analysis (Psychological Bulletin)
- The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (revised edition)
- Marital processes predictive of later dissolution: behavior, physiology, and health (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)
- The observation of specific affect in marital interactions: psychometric properties of a coding system and a rating system (Psychological Assessment)
- Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself
- Are there basic emotions? (Psychological Review)
- Darwin's contributions to our understanding of emotional expressions (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B)
- Nonverbal leakage and clues to deception (Psychiatry)
- Do proposed facial expressions of contempt, shame, embarrassment, and compassion communicate the predicted emotion? (Cognition & Emotion)
- The Four Horsemen: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness, and Stonewalling
Why there are no statistics here
There are none because none survived checking. The figures that circulate in writing about contempt — a divorce-prediction accuracy rate, a duration for a fleeting facial movement, a share of communication said to be non-verbal — are repeated far more often than they are sourced, and we could not trace them to a primary source that says what the retelling claims. So this site publishes no numbers at all. That is the strictest version of the rule, and it is easier to hold than a rule with exceptions.
The rules
- Primary source only — we link the original work, not an article about it.
- The work is named in the same sentence as the claim it supports, so the claim travels with its source.
- A link may only carry the weight the work actually bears. Every source in the list above was registered with a written limit on what it may be used to claim, and a sentence that needs more than its source gives gets rewritten rather than propped up with a citation.
- A source we could not open and read does not get linked, however often it is quoted elsewhere.
- Nothing here diagnoses anyone. Research describes patterns across groups; it does not measure your relationship.
Found something we have got wrong? Tell us — corrections are made on the page, not quietly.