Gottman's Four Horsemen and Flooding

I came across reference to Gottman's four horsemen again in yet another book I was reading late last night. I mentioned before that I finished the book "Blink" but have been too lazy to extract what I want to remember from that book. Anyway, one of the portions I wanted to extract was the reference to the four horsemen in Blink. Fortunately, someone else must have deemed that portion worth sharing too and you can click here, to read that portion of Blink.

Gottman is apparently a leading expert on the issue of divorce with the ability to predict with more than 90% accuracy, which marriages will end in divorce. Malcom Gladwell, the author of Blink concludes that such prediction is based on pattern recognition.

What Gottman looks out for is the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. And, even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt. "Contempt is closely related to disgust, and what disgust and contempt are about is completely rejecting and excluding someone from the community."

Criticism – Global negative statements about your partner’s character or personality. The difference between complaint and criticism is that criticism has blaming in it. It’s attacking someone’s personality or character, instead of being specific about a complaint
Defensiveness – This is a way of blaming your partner and can escalate the conflict. A person will try to defend himself or herself by denying responsibility and dishing back calculated insults.
Contempt – Sarcasm, cynicism, name-calling, eye-rolling, sneering, mockery and hostile humor can be poisonous because they convey disgust. What separates contempt from criticism is the intent to insult and psychologically abuse your partner. Contempt is the acid in the relationship. Putting down your partner with insulting jokes, critical comments, facial expressions and verbal abuse can destroy any chance of intimacy.
Stonewalling – A partner may disengage from the relationship, signaled by looking away without saying anything and acting as though he/she doesn’t care about what the other is saying. Stonewallers withdraw from interacting emotionally in the marriage. They just stop communicating, even if an insulting situation occurs.

The Four Horsemen alone predict divorce with 82% accuracy but when you add in the failure of repair attempts (repair attempts are efforts a couple makes to deescalate tension during conflict – “to put on the brakes so flooding is prevented.”), the accuracy goes to 90+% Dr. Gottman refers to flooding as when "you feel overwhelmed and disorganized by the way your partner expresses negativity..."