How not to be a jerk during your next fight

"I can sum up in three "acts" the breakdowns and breakups of most relationships since the beginning of time:

Act 1: You hurt me.
Act 2: Because you hurt me, I now hurt you.
Act 3: Because you hurt me, I now hurt you and so you hurt me again and so I hurt you -- and downward spiraling we shall go.
John Gottman, the famed founder of The Love Lab (a family research laboratory where where couples are studied), says he can consistently predict how long a relationship will last, not based on how well a couple gets along, but by how well a couple doesn't get along.

A relationship is only as strong as how well the two can deal with their weakest moments and how well they handle conflict."

Read the full story at CNN By Karen Salmansohn from Oprah.com

Simple ways to not be a idiot during your next fight:

0. Apply Bible principles of love and respect.

1. Pick the right time and the right place, in private.

2. Avoid harsh start-ups such as starting out blaming or calling your partner bad names.

3. Always be virtuous. Don't be cold, pridefull, angry or become hysterica.

4. Instead of trying to win arguments, try to have a winning relationship!

5. Put in the "virtue of discipline" to calm yourself before you begin talking. Be calm and reasonable and your mate will be too.

6. Close a difficult conversation by sharing memories of good times and/or your partner's good qualities. You can catch more Bees with honey than with vinegar. A few kind words can go a long way.

Bullies' Brains Light Up With Pleasure as People Squirm

When shown videos of someone inflicting pain (such as closing a piano lid on a player's fingers, above), bullies experience activity in their brains' pleasure centers, a November 2008 study showed. The subjects tested seemed to enjoy seeing people hurt.

Image courtesy Jean Decety, University of Chicago

The brains of bullies—kids who start fights, tell lies, and break stuff with glee—may be wired to feel pleasure when watching others suffer pain, according to a new brain scanning study.

The finding was unexpected, noted Benjamin Lahey, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and co-author of the study, which appears in the new issue of the journal Biological Psychology.

The researchers had expected that the bullies would show no response when they witnessed pain in somebody else—that they experience a sort of emotional coldness that allows them to steal milk money with no remorse, for example.

Previous research had shown that when nonbullies see other people in pain, the same areas of the brain light up that do when the nonbullies themselves experience pain—a sign of empathy, Lahey said.

The new research showed these areas in the bullies' brains were even more active than in the nonbullies.

But the bullies' empathetic response seemed to be warped by activity in the amygdala and ventral striatum, regions of the brain sometimes associated with reward and pleasure.

"We think it means that they like seeing people in pain," Lahey said.

"If that is true," he added, "they are getting positively reinforced every time they bully and are aggressive to other people."

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