Romance: Communication Combat

If successful pair bonding hinges on good communication, you'd expect lovers to be interaction pros. But when it comes to getting their message across, are romantic partners any better than perfect strangers? We scoured the research to find out. —Karina Grudnikov

• The Challenge: To convey emotions through touch alone

• Advantage: Couples. Lovers and strangers can express the taps, rubs, and presses that signal anger, fear, disgust, gratitude, happiness, love, sadness, and sympathy by touching the other person's arm, a new study from King's College London finds. But only couples can accurately convey the self-focused emotions of envy, embarrassment, and pride. "Couples may naturally be more tactile with one another, which helps them recognize hard-to-read touches," says researcher Erin H. Thompson.

• The Challenge: To make your words understood

• Advantage: Neither. Romantic partners were confident their mates could read the message behind ambiguous phrases like "It's getting hot in here." But couples proved no more successful than strangers in conveying their intended meaning, notes a study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. "We're egocentric communicators—we assume others know what we know," says Williams College researcher Ken Savitsky. And we think loved ones, especially, will "catch our drift." Acknowledge your biases and ask for clarification.

• The Challenge: To recall a shared memory

• Advantage: Strangers. Does love make hindsight less than 20/20? Couples thought their trusty partners' input would boost their accuracy in recalling a shared experience. But romantic pairs were much more likely to misreport info after discussing than were strangers, according to research in Acta Psychologica. It seems that we accept our honey's recollections, merging his or her factual errors into our remembrance, yet distrust any inaccuracies in a stranger's account.

Present Tense

Why the sweetest gifts are the most obvious ones

'Tis the season of nuptials and anniversaries—which means plenty of rounds of gift exchange. Harvard researchers compared the presents that wedding guests thought couples appreciated most with the ones newlyweds actually adored. Surprise: Buyers got it all wrong. "In life, we play the role of both giver and recipient," says psychologist Francesca Gino, "but when we switch from one role to the other, our take on a 'thoughtful gift' shifts." Here are a few findings to heed next time you're gift shopping. —Andrea Bartz

Recipients appreciate explicitly requested gifts over unsolicited ones.

The best wedding presents, according to married couples, are on the registry. But gift-buyers wrongly assume surprises are at least as appreciated. "It's more thoughtful to honor someone's wishes than to figure you know better," Gino says.

Recipients love presents they're scared to ask for.

The best unsolicited presents, though, are ones the celebrant would feel guilty requesting, suggests preliminary research from Gino. If your honey is frugal, don't get her another gourmet-on-a-shoestring cookbook; buy her an opulent meal.

Cash trumps all.

Givers worry that recipients don't appreciate money as much as a solicited gift, but the opposite is true. Cash isn't the cop-out present you might expect, so give freely.

One-item wish lists make everybody happy.

"Recipients often list options because they don't want to constrain givers," Gino says. But if you really want one thing, ask and you shall receive—givers feel good about chipping in, and getters nab what they want.