A good fight with your spouse may be good for your health, a study from the University of Michigan suggests.

Researchers there said couples in which both the husband and wife suppress their anger die earlier than members of couples where one or both partners express their anger and resolve the conflict.

The researchers looked at 192 couples over 17 years and placed them into one of four categories: in the first, both partners communicate their anger; in the second and third groups one spouse expresses while the other suppresses; and in the fourth both the husband and wife suppress their anger, said Ernest Harburg.

When both spouses suppress their anger at the other when unfairly attacked, earlier death was twice as likely than in all other types, he said.

"When couples get together, one of their main jobs is reconciliation about conflict," Harburg said. "Usually, nobody is trained to do this. If they have good parents, they can imitate, that's fine, but usually the couple is ignorant about the process of resolving conflict. The key matter is, when the conflict happens, how do you resolve it?"

"When you don't, if you bury your anger, and you brood on it and you resent the other person or the attacker, and you don't try to resolve the problem, then you're in trouble."

Of the 192 couples studied, 26 pairs both suppressed their anger and there were 13 deaths in that group. In the remaining 166 pairs, there were 41 deaths combined.

In 27 percent of those couples who both suppressed their anger, one member of the couple died during the study period, and in 23 percent of those couples both died during the study period.

That's compared to only six percent of couples where both spouses died in the remaining three groups combined. Only 19 percent in the remaining three groups combined saw one partner die during the study period.

The study tried to account for factors such as age, smoking and other problems.