Predicting Relationship Breakups With a Word-Association Task

There seems to be an IAT for everything these days.

Here’s a way to tell a romantic relationship is going to fall apart: find out what people really think about their partners. The researchers in a new study used a so-called implicit task, which shows how people automatically respond to words — in this case, whether they find it easier to link words referring to their partner to words with pleasant or unpleasant meanings.