Some reflections on the two psychologies of love

The mainstream view of love is that it is a state that arises from people mutually reinforcing each other or providing benefits to each other Yet careful quantitative analyses of imaginative thought patterns of people in love or in a state of affiliative arousal reveal themes of dialogue, commitment, and harmony rather than of mutual benefits It is suggested that asking people about love leads them to give causal explanations for the state which psychologists have elaborated into the theory that love is a response to having one's needs met Imaginative experiences characteristic of the state of being in love on the other hand may be different because they are primarily right brain mediated and do not share in the causal, instrumental type of reasoning characteristic of left brain conscious thinking Such conceivably right brain mediated experiences in TATs are more closely associated than presumably left brain mediated self-reports are with such physiological measures as evoked scalp potentials, neurohormone concentrations, and immune functions A vew of love that takes both self-report (left brain) and fantasy (right brain) measures into account does a better job of predicting affiliative behavior than does a view that relies solely on one or the other of the two types of measures