“Introduction to Psychology" Notes (8) —— Love

Lecture 9: Love (Guest Lecture by Professor Peter Salovey)

A definition of love--according to Robert Sternberg

1. intimacy:the feeling of closeness, of connectedness with someone, of bonding.
2. passion:Drive that leads to romance, physicalattraction and sex.
3. commitment:desire to maintain the relationship.

Different permutations of relationships:

1. liking: with intimacy, without passion and commitment. It is happening in most typical friendships, not your closest friendship but friendships of a casual kind.
2. infatuation: with passion, without intimacy and commitment.
3. empty love: with commitment, without intimacy and passion.
4. romantic love:with intimacy and passion, without commitment
   
5. companionate love:committed to sharing intimacy, to being friends forever, committed to this relationship but physical attraction is not part of the equation here.
6. fatuous love: passion, but no intimacy, but committed to maintaining this physical attraction to you.
7. consummate love:have all three -- intimacy, passion, commitment.

The social psychology of attraction has focused on seven variables which are divided into two categories:

1. the big three:People who are similar to you, people who are already familiar to you, people who are nearby in space.
1. Proximity: "All other things being equal": people who find themselves in close spatial proximity to each other, like sharing an armrest in a lecture, will be more likely to be attracted to each other and form a romantic relationship.
2. Similarity: "Birds of a feather flock together":the more similar the more likely you'll find each other attractive.
3. Familiarity--We tend to fall in love with people in our environment with whom we are already familiar.
2. The more interesting four:
1. Competence:The kind of person we're really attracted to is the competent individual who occasionally blunders.
   
• Pratfall Effect:our liking for the competent person grows when they make a mistake, when they do something embarrassing, when they have a failure experience.
• Why: Because people who seem competent on all dimensions, they're kind of threatening to us. They don't make us feel so good about ourselves. They make us feel a bit diminished by comparison.
2. Physical attractiveness: the feedback from the attractive person matters more to us.
3. Gain, loss: a general idea in psychology that we are in a way wired up to be more sensitive to change than to steady states.
• Gain Effect: We are really attracted to people whose regard for us is gaining momentum over time.
• Loss effect: People who really hurt us are not the people who have always been negative.The person who always was positive to you whose regard starts to fade is hurting us most.
4. the misattribution for the causes of arousal:you make a mistake in your explanation and think it's love when it might be due to something else.