Study: Breaking Up Easier Than Anticipated

Broken hearts have inspired great works of music, literature, and art. But new research suggests that people overestimate how much breaking up with a partner will affect them, according to a press release issued by Northwestern University.

In the study participants were asked to forecast the emotional impact that a breakup would have on their lives. Those who reported that they were the most in love with their partner were the most likely to overestimate how badly they felt when the breakup occurred.

"Our research shows that a breakup is not nearly as bad as people imagine," said Eli Finkel, assistant professor of psychology in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and co-author of the study in the press release. "And the more you are in love with your partner, the more wrong you are about how upset you are going to be when the dreaded loss actually occurs."

However, those that reported they were most in love were their partners did suffer more than the other participants. The actually suffering, did not compare to the imagined suffering that the participant felt would occur.

The study spanned nine months and used participants who had been in a relationship of at least two months. The participants that were still involved with their partners completed questionnaires every two weeks for 20 sessions. The questionnaires were designed to measure and predict stress. They found that the distress anticipated two weeks before a breakup was much greater than that experienced in the weeks following the breakup.

"Overestimates of the most-in-love participants, of how badly they would feel after a breakup, were much greater than the predictions of participants less in love," said Paul Eastwick, the lead author of the study and a graduate student in psychology at Northwestern in the press release. "Their levels of distress were nowhere near their catastrophic predictions."

The complete study will be published as "Mispredicting Distress Following Romantic Breakup: Revealing the Time Course of the Affective Forecasting Error" in the online edition of The Journal of Experimental Social Physchology.