Contempt
Peer-Reviewed
The most corrosive of Gottman's Four Horsemen. Treating a partner as beneath you.
Evidence
Peer-Reviewed
Contempt, treating a partner with disdain through mockery, eye-rolling or sarcasm, earns Peer-Reviewed as a descriptive Gottman construct. Of the Four Horsemen it is the single strongest behavioral marker separating distressed from stable couples in observational coding (Specific Affect Coding System; Heyman, 2001). The rating reflects this descriptive, correlational evidence, not the marketed claim that contempt alone forecasts divorce with high precision, which rests on after-the-fact model fitting and is weaker.