"We thought the movie treatment would help but not nearly as much as the other programmes in which we were teaching all of these state-of-the-art skills," said lead author Ronald Rogge, an associate professor of psychology at University of Rochester in New York.
But the results showed that an inexpensive, fun and relatively simple movie-and-talk approach can be just as effective as other more intensive therapist-led methods - reducing the divorce or separation rate from 24 to 11 percent after three years.
