Today’s Goals

  • Mini review: Prosocial behaviour
  • Review the history of love research in psychology
  • Discuss how psychologists and lay people define love
  • Review the correlates of different approaches to and experiences of love

 

Mini-Review

  • What does research suggest about the time of final paper submission and the grade it receives?
  • How does evolutionary theory explain helping behaviour?
  • Why is it hard to conclusively show that helping is purely altruistic?
  • Describe a piece of evidence for ‘intuitive prosociality’ from the cognitive approach?

 

Love

  • Emotion
  • Other’s importance as high as self
  • Friendship & trust
  • Mutual respect
  • Enduring support
  • Compromise (accepting differences)
  • Action (not just feeling)
  • Vulnerable
  • Physiological response (or resolution)
  • Passion
  • Allowing other to grow
  • Commitment
  • The early days..
    • Behaviourism, psychoanalytic views
    • Harlow’s monkey studies

 

Kinds of Love

  • Many approaches
  • Still lacking consensus (cf., Big 5)
  • Yet overlap among ideas
  • ‘Quadrumvirate’ model
    1. Passionate

Associated more with romantic relationships

  1. Companionate
  2. Compassionate

Emerging – empathetic kind of love

Heart ‘going out’ to an individual

  1. (Attachment)

Notion – attachment theory

Ability to be securely attached

 

Passionate Love

  • Begins with physical attraction, signs of liking – direction
  • Promotes a sexual relationship
  • Similar to ‘Eros’
  • My lover and I have the right physical “chemistry” between us.
  • My lover and I were attracted to each other immediately after we first met.
  • My lover and I really understand each other.
  • I feel that my lover and I were meant for each other.

 

Companionate Love

  • Begins with familiarity, similarity, friendship
  • Promotes spending time together, expressions of liking
  • Similar to ‘Storge’ o Genuine love first requires caring for awhile. o Our friendship merged gradually into love over time. o Love is really a deep friendship, not a mysterious, mystical emotion.
    • Genuine love first requires caring for awhile.

 

Compassionate Love

  • Begins with perception of need or distress
  • Promotes response to distress (so varied)

Empathetic response to someone who requries help

  • Similar to ‘Agape’
  • I would endure all things for the sake of my lover.
  • Whatever I own is my lover’s to use as he/ she chooses.
  • I try to always help my lover through difficult times.
  • When my lover gets angry with me, I still love him/her fully and unconditionally.

 

The Prototype Approach

  • Ask people to nominate features of love(rs)
  • Ask others to rate ‘prototypicality’
  • ‘Companionate love’ features more typical o Trust, honesty, caring, intimacy, respect – central things people tend to report about love

VERSUS o Sexual passion, gazing at other, physiological • (similar in romantic & compassionate specifically)

  • Do psychologists ‘over-think’ love? One kind?
  • Prototypes represented in hedging, memory, RTs

Tricky boundaries between types of love – big 4

Grouping together of characteristics based on similar features

 

Gender Differences

  • Overall, much similarity, but some differences
  • Men more prone to ‘romantic’ conceptions

Conceptions: the belief of what love is – different from experience

  • ‘true love’ , saying it (?)

In a couple of studies, men are the first to openly express love – not super conclusive

  • Woman more prone to pragmatic or companionate conceptions, friendship love
  • Similar differences in experience of love
  • This is not ‘Mars’ and ‘Venus’

Difference in experience and thought about love

Not much of a difference between sexes

 

Culture Differences

  • Again, careful to not over-emphasize. o Individual vs. collectivist cultures o Romantic vs. arranged marriages o Differences in ‘day to day’ of marriages
  • ‘Eros’ (passion) conceptions high in all, but higher with individualism (or vs. Asian?) ‘Storge’ somewhat lower in individualists
  • (Compassionate love unclear)

Hasn’t been around enough to study cross-culturally

 

Romantic Relationships Over Time

  • Does passion fade into companionate love?
    • Not really, both possible early, both fade
  • Satisfaction predicted by passionate conception; splits by low companionate conception Splits: breakups
  • Experience of all types associated with satisfaction o stronger with time for compassion & companionate love

What predicts satisfaction over time in longer-term couples

  • Love experience (all kinds) correlated with commitment
  • Love experience important to staying together, but less so after marriage Individuals tend to stay committed in marital situations due to other variables

 

Love Research

  • Some cautions…

Has not received a ton of attention

  • Typically correlational (causal direction)
  • Self reports o Subjective construct, but pressures, e.g., RE sex?
  • Need for longitudinal data
  • Challenge of consensus for models/types o Beyond subjective (e.g., cause & consequence)

Difficulty of studying dyads