Gottman Connect

The All-New, Legendary Love Lab

From it’s historic origins in 1986 at a research lab at the University of Washington, the world-renowned Love Lab, founded by Dr. John Gottman, has developed the most powerful relationship assessment available today. This evidence-based assessment is designed to help clinicians diagnose the most complex relationship challenges.

Pursuing the Gottman mission of democratizing global access to even the most powerful therapeutic tools, in 2019, Affective Software, in partnership with the Gottman Institute, leveraged the latest in cutting-edge technological advancements to bring the Love Lab into the 21st century. With the release of Gottman Connect, an easy-to-use online platform, clinicians and couples all around the world can now leverage the power of the Gottman Love Lab.

"Since the 1980s, Gottman has brought more than three thousand married couples—just like Bill and Sue—into that small room in his "Love Lab" near the University of Washington campus… Can a marriage really be understood in one sitting? Yes it can, and so can lots of other seemingly complex situations. What Gottman has done is to show us how."

Malcolm Gladwell

5x NYT Best-Selling Author, Time’s 100 Most Influential People

The Love Lab on Gottman Connect

The prestigious Gottman Love Lab is now available via the Gottman Connect telehealth portal! This scientific evaluation, more powerful than ever, is the most comprehensive relationship assessment available and can help pinpoint the areas in which couples can achieve the greatest growth so they can move forward to a place of strength, reconnection, and hope.

In the all-new virtual Gottman Love Lab experience, couples complete a clinical questionnaire and a video evaluation process to receive a scientific x-ray into their relationship. This level of assessment is not available anywhere else.

Benefits to your practice

Expand and differentiate your practice by leveraging the proven Gottman Love Lab brand
Help couples heal faster with deeper, video-based analyses of emotion, attunement, flooding, and more
Use the most advanced available clinical therapy tools
Provide clear results and powerful insights with automatically generated analysis reports for even more effective therapy

A Powerful Assessment in 4 Simple Steps

Register and invite your couples to the Gottman questionnaire

If you haven’t already, start by signing up as a clinician on Gottman Connect via a simple, free registration process. Once logged-in, easily invite your couple to register using an automated process. Each partner gets their own, private login to Gottman Connect and will need to complete their clinicial questionnaires on their own.

Record two conversational videos

After each partner has submitted their questionnaire on Gottman Connect, each couple will need to record two videos together: an “events” conversation, and a “conflict” conversation.

Since each clinical practice is different, there are various ways of submitting these videos for analysis. Couples can record these videos on their own, or together with their clinician. Clear instructions are available once you login.

Guide your couple in rating each video

Once both videos are recorded and uploaded, each partner will need to log in to Gottman Connect and watch their recordings, using an easy-to-use dial to rate how they felt during the recorded conversations. According to Gottman's research, this self-rating is a critical step for the evaluation process.

Complete the clinician’s checklist

After your couple has completed their Gottman questionnaires, recorded, and rated their two videos, you will need to answer a brief checklist based on your professional observations of this couple. This is the final step in the evaluation process - once you submit your "Clinician's Checklist", the virtual Love Lab will automatically calculate and generate several reports, providing you and your couple deep insights into their relationship.

Additional instructions and report walkthroughs are available upon login.

A Brief History of the Gottman Love Lab

1970s

Research begins

Dr. John Gottman begins systematically observing couples in his first lab at the University of Illinois in the 1970s.

1986

"the love lab"

In 1986, Gottman (right) and Robert Levenson (left) build an apartment laboratory at the University of Washington dubbed the "Love Lab" by the media.

1996

founding Tgi

In 1996, Drs. Julie and John Gottman co-founded The Gottman Institute to bring this research to the world.

2015

first research director

In 2015, Drs. John and Julie Gottman asked Carrie Cole, a Master Trainer for the Gottman Institute, to be the Institute’s first Research Director.

2018

the lab at tgi

In February of 2018, the Gottman Love Lab was re-imagined by The Gottman Institute in the heart of downtown Seattle and opened its doors to the public for the first time.

2019

the all-new virtual Gottman love lab

With breakthroughs achieved by expert mathematician and optimization specialist Dr. Vladimir Brayman and his team, ASI launches an all-new virtual Love Lab, available globally online for the first time in history.

In the news

The Love Lab has been notably profiled in Blink, Malcolm Gladwell’s NYT best seller, and has been featured by Dateline NBC, BBC, The Anderson Cooper Show, TIME Magazine, and The Atlantic.

did you know?

Over many years, Gottman and Levenson observed hundreds of couples and noted their facial expressions, heart rates, blood pressure, skin conductivity, and the words they used in conversation with their partners.

They discovered that low-risk couples maintain a “magic ratio” of five positive interactions to every one negative interaction during conflict.