PAR author Lisa Firestone will be presenting two continuing education workshops in Boston, Massachusetts in December.

The workshops are sponsored by the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology and highlight the topics of suicide treatment and prevention and working with high conflict couples.

“The War Within: Working with Suicidal Individuals” will be held December 6, from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. This course focuses on giving more extensive training to practitioners in the treatment of suicidal clients.

“Transforming War Between Intimates: Working with High Conflict Couples” will be held December 7, from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Focusing on Gottman’s research on the predictors of longevity in a relationship, this course will discuss styles of relating and how couples can challenge behaviors that interfere with closeness and longevity.

For more information or to register, click on the course descriptions above.

There’s no need to read between the lines when you are trying to decipher whether your significant other is right for you or not. According to new research from University of Texas at Austin social psychologist James W. Pennebaker, the truth may be somewhere in the pronouns.

In a recent experiment, Pennebaker and his team gathered 187 students and asked them to partake in a speed dating event at Northwestern University. During the four-minute dates, Pennebaker focused on the use of personal pronouns (e.g., I, you, and me), articles, preopositions, conjunctions, and other small words. According to Pennebaker, although these words are processed rapidly and subconsciously, our use of them can reveal whether a relationship will work or how well two individuals might work together. Couples whose language styles matched – those who used similar levels of personal pronouns, prepositions, and articles – were three times as likely to express an interest in dating each other than those couples who language styles did not match.

Language style matching (LSM) may be better at predicting love connections than even the individuals involved! LSM was able to determine relationships that weren’t a match even when one speed dater showed interest that was not reciprocated by the other.

Want to see how you and your partner stack up? You can try LSM yourself by entering e-mails, text messages, or even general writing samples to get an idea of how your score stacks up. Click here to see how you do.