Healing Wounds and Marital Conflict

If your spouse hits you over the head and cuts your scalp, it’s likely to take longer to heal than if you get the same injury in a household accident.  That’s what a study reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry tells us.  Healthy couples volunteered to be admitted to hospital for 24 hours, twice. During their first stay they had a ‘structured social support interaction’ – they discussed something that they wanted to change in their relationship with the help of a trained health professional.  A blister was raised with a vacuum pump on their forearms, and the time taken to heal was recorded, using daily inspections.  At the second visit, the couples were instructed to try to resolve one or two areas of marital conflict, without any help from a third party.

The blisters healed more slowly after the hostile discussion than when they had a more supported discussion.  And for very hostile couples the wounds healed at about 60% of the rate in the less-hostile couples.

The mechanism of this difference lay in the in the amounts of proteins called cytokines that are produced locally in response to an injury; the amounts around the blister levels were much higher in the less hostile couples.  It was found, however, that the high-conflict couples had high blood levels of cytokines in the morning after their hostile discussion; this is important, as high blood levels of cytokines are sometimes linked to a number of age-related conditions, such as heart disease. . .