Today just a video, but it REALLY is a good lecture on love. I personally believe that it is definitely worth spending 1,5h on watching it and it doesn’t require any intro.
Dr. Frank Conner presents “The Psychology of Love: Do Opposites Attract or Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together?” as part of the 2009-2010 Psychology Lecture Series at Grand Rapids Community College.
Conclusions from research presented in the recording correspond with the every-day life and can easily help us understand what is happening in our relationship. I think everyone (married/in an informal relationship/single ones…) should see it.
Lee identified and described the ways people behave in interpersonal relationships. They are called Lee’s 6 Styles of Loving. It is a simplification – of course -
but I decided to mention it since the terms have grown into the theoretical approach as a good tool to name and study different types of love.
Three primary styles:
1. Eros – a passionate physical and emotional love to an ideal person based on aesthetic enjoyment (stereotypic romantic love);
2. Ludus (or ludos) – love as a game, conquest or sport;
3. Storge – love that slowly develops from friendship, based on similarity;
Three secondary styles:
Mania (Eros + Ludus) – obsessive love with great emotional highs and lows; lovers tend to be very possessive and jealous;
Pragma (Ludus + Storge) – realistic and practical love driven by the head, not the heart; undemonstrative
Here’s a nice video by Scientific American. Thanks to this short presentation you can trace the chemical changes in the brain during different phases of romance and the process of getting attracted.
Some information presented might seem basic, but it seems good for the beginning :-D
Nicely done, informative, keeps the speed and makes difficult processes seem simple.
A jealous husband hired a private detective to check on the movements of his wife. The husband wanted more than a written report; he wanted video of his wife’s activities.
A week later, the detective returned with a video. They sat down together to watch it. Although the quality was less than professional, the man saw his wife meeting another man! He saw the two of them laughing in the park. He saw them enjoying themselves at an outdoor café. He saw them dancing in a dimly lit nightclub. He saw the man and his wife participate in a dozen activities with utter glee.
“I just can’t believe this,” the distraught husband said.
The detective said, “What’s not to believe? It’s right up there on the screen!”
The husband replied, “I can’t believe that my wife could be so much fun!”
Apparently neuroscientists from Stanford University assumed that the intensity of love can be measured using fMRI scanner. They were checking the levels of activity in the dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin/vasopressin pathways to assess the depth of one’s love for a chosen person. Interestingly they admitted various sorts of love.
Apparently empirical research has not been very successful at predicting which married couples are likely to separate/divorce and which married couples will stay together so far and only few researches have resulted in finding some indicators which could help with describing couples seeming to be at the greatest risk for martial dissolution.
Accordingly to Gottman and colleagues (Gottman, 1994; Gottman & Levenson, 1992) the way couples behave in conflict situations is more diagnostic of couple success than behavior in either pleasant or neutral interactions.
As I understand, this suggests that it is difficult to make up for negative interactions (in which speaker slopes isn’t significantly positive) in conflict situations between spouses, even if there are positive and pleasant interactions between partners occurring as well. Read the rest of this entry »
Since we know that romantic love escalates within a functionally isolated, closed brain system and that the caudate nucleus would be the crucial brain region in the evolution of love, it is suggested that the hormonal
products of pineal gland may attenuate the romantic love through the anti-dopaminergic and inhibitory effects of theirs on the nucleus. This mechanism might turn out useful in early stages of romantic love to “cure” the infatuation. This means it may be possible to attenuate it by external administration of the melatonin and vasotocin (Shoja, Tubbs, Ansarin, 2007).
This hypothesis sounds somehow promising since Helen Fisher‘s research shows that almost 95% of men and women asked reports being dumped by someone they really loved.
The connection between love and enforced feeling of empathy seems quite obvious, especially if we are thinking empathy for the beloved one. Even though someone asked 839 people – straight forward – if they would agree with the statement regarding themselves and the ones they were in love with “I feel happy when …… is happy and sad when he/she is sad”.
64% of men and 76% of women agreed with the statement
No surprise, huh?
The data comes from Helen Fisher’s research described in her book “Why We Love? The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love” (Henry Holt and Company, new York, 2005).
Today a video of Mark Gungor explaining the differences and reasons for misunderstandings between men and women in a humoristic and a bit sarcastic way ;-) Enjoy!
A graduate student in fields of psychology and economics. Likes looking for explanation of things, especially interested in theories and research regarding romantic relationships.
