Christopher Neu, Trevor Alder, Brigham Young University
Nonverbal communication or body language is a large part of how humans interact, especially in relationships. However, prior research has reported varying conclusions about if there is a relationship between nonverbal communication decoding(NCD) and marital satisfaction, and if there is, the strength of that relationship. We believe this is because of underlying moderators. Therefore, we hypothesized that empathy, self-worth, and sexual satisfaction would moderate the aforementioned relationship. We believe that empathy moderates this relationship because it provides incentive to decode and pay attention to a spouse’s body language. Similarly, sexual satisfaction and self worth would increase attention to body language both of one’s self as well as that of the partner and therefore moderate the relationship between NCD and marital satisfaction. We gathered responses from 500 participants through Amazon’s Mturk. We found that NCD was significantly related to marital abuse when sexual satisfaction was low, and additionally that NCD was related to marital interaction when empathy was low. All other relationships between NCD and marital satisfaction measures were insignificant.