Study: Mental conditioning with cute animal pictures can rekindle your relationship

James K. McNulty of Florida State University and his team of psychological scientists were not expecting this. They’d wondered if they could use conditioning to warm the hearts of married couples gone a little cold from numbing day to day life by building associations between spouses’ faces and pictures of adorable puppies and bunnies. “I was actually a little surprised that it worked,” McNulty tells APS, a publication of the Association of Psychological Science. “All the theory I reviewed on evaluative conditioning suggested it should, but existing theories of relationships, and just the idea that something so simple and unrelated to marriage could affect how people feel about their marriage, made me skeptical.”