Beyond-personal love – Experiencing love beyond the person

ABSTRACT

Love is seen as interpersonal phenomenon in western society. The love of things that are non-interpersonal or ‘beyond-personal’ is less understood. A sample of 208 adults responded to a questionnaire asking what they loved, and how much they loved 61 common objects, activities, experiences and ideas. An exploratory factor analysis yielded five distinct categories of beyond-personal love including spiritual ideology, physical activity, material objects, hedonic experiences and social experiences. Loving physical activities predicted life satisfaction, happiness, and presence of meaning. Loving social experiences predicted happiness and presence of meaning. Loving hedonic experiences, spiritual ideas or material objects did not predict any of the outcome variables when all factors were considered, but material love was correlated with search for meaning. Results show that beyond-personal love can be considered adaptive, yet the target of beyond-personal love can predict whether one feels life satisfaction, feels subjectively happy or has meaning in one’s life.     

‘I love you’. How to understand love in couple therapy? Exploring love in context

Acknowledging the place of love in couple therapy requires therapists to reflect upon what love means to them. We propose that love defines the couple relationship and in turn the relationship defines love. In this article we explore and focus on our conceptualization of love and its influence on couple therapy. Exploring love in the context of the phrase ‘I love you’ leads us to consider built‐in contradictions. These contradictions can be contextualized and understood in a relational dialectic framework. Implications for therapy are explored and briefly illustrated in a case vignette.     

What kind of love is love at first sight? An empirical investigation

Love at first sight (LAFS) is a commonly known phenomenon, but has barely been investigated scientifically. Major psychological theories of love predict that LAFS is marked by high passion. However, it could also be a memory confabulation construed by couples to enhance their relationship. We investigated LAFS empirically by assessing feelings of love at the moment participants met potential partners for the first time. Data were collected from an online study, a laboratory study, and three dating events. Experiences of LAFS were marked neither by high passion, nor by intimacy, nor by commitment. Physical attraction was highly predictive of reporting LAFS. We therefore suggest that LAFS is not a distinct form of love, but rather a strong initial attraction that some label as LAFS, either in the moment of first sight or retrospectively.     

satisfy love在爱中满足

每天都有人死去,这不难理解.在一次高空作业中,在养老院里,在手术台上,在田间,在车上……死亡容不得你跟它预约.它也不会特别光顾某个晴天或某个阴天,是礼拜一还是礼拜二.     

What is this thing called love? Defining the love that supports marriage and family

The aim of this article was to define, on the basis of theorizing and research, the love that supports marriage and the family, or the type of love that is related to high levels of satisfaction in relationships, to the psychological well-being of family members and to stable family relationships. Literature is reviewed that explores the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral aspects of both mature and immature love, and I conclude that all three aspects of love can be either mature or immature. With regard to the emotional component, I have noted that feelings of both passion and companionship can continue throughout life. Immature love is exemplified in such constructs as limerence, love addiction, and infatuation. Given that love is socially constructed, I note that it can be strongly affected by the beliefs about love that are present in the culture, and that these beliefs can be either functional or dysfunctional. Particularly dysfunctional beliefs include those emphasizing that love is blind, external, and beyond the control of the lovers. Behaviors characteristic of mature and immature love are also explored. It seems that mature love may be best conceptualized as creating an environment in which both the lovers and those who depend on them can grow and develop. This type of love supports marriage and family life.     

What do sensory scales measure?

It is indeed an honour to have drawn Professor Stevens' fire (1964), in view of the magnitude of his research achievement in the field of sensory scaling. If I shall differ with him on certain of his conclusions, it is in full awareness of the debt we all owe him for the experimentation and thinking which has provided much of the factual basis and theoretical stimulus to further research and development in this area.

Professor Stevens (1960, 1964) advocates a psychophysical power law, while I have questioned it (Treisman, 1961, 1962, 1963a, 1963b, 1964a). I shall here examine the main points of disagreement lying behind these differing positions.     

Free love? On the relation between belief in free will,determinism, and passionate love

Is love possible if we are not free? Some philosophers consider that true love is necessarily free, while others think that the nature of love makes it incompatible with a certain type of freedom. Here, we explored the relationship between feelings of passionate love, belief in free will and determinism across three online studies. In Study 1 (N = 257), participants who believed strongly in free will (or determinism) expressed stronger passionate love. In Study 2 (N = 305), we again found a positive association between belief in free will (or determinism) and passionate love, although the passionate love-determinism relationship seems more conditional. Finally, Study 3 (N = 309) confirmed the relationship between belief in free will and passionate love but not between belief in determinism and passionate love. These findings, along with a meta-analysis, suggest that both beliefs in free will and determinism are compatible with passionate love.     

Is there a special psychoanalytic love?

Although the analyst's role mandates a degree of detachment, analysts have often said that they offer patients a special kind of love. They have tended to equate that love with understanding, thus neutralizing the paradox but also diluting the love. When something more resembling a loving affect is sought, the suggestions include the love a scholar feels for his subject, the love that accompanies immersion in great literature, and love that is self-generated by deliberate efforts to move toward the patient or to generate empathy in oneself. But a form of love may also arise from the analyst's unique and relatively pure acquaintance with a person's "appeal," by which is meant the patient's effort to elicit responses from the analyst. Although the awareness of transference most obviously tends to immunize him, it also gives him a poignant "insider's" feel of the patient's appeal, since he is the target of that appeal while being unencumbered by the myriad considerations that would color his perception were he to regard himself as a proper object.     

Enkrasia or evidentialism? Learning to love mismatch

Philosophical Studies - I formulate a resilient paradox about epistemic rationality, discuss and reject various solutions, and sketch a way out. The paradox exemplifies a tension between a wide...     

Are curmudgeon personality scales resistant to response distortion?

Curmudgeon personality, which is assessed by having participants evaluate a heterogeneous set of attitude objects, provides an applied value beyond that of more established personality traits. Recent research, for instance, suggests that curmudgeon personality is distinct from the Five Factor Model personality traits and that it predicts unique variance in important criteria, such as job attitudes and well-being. In the current paper we contribute to this literature by testing an explanation of how curmudgeon personality is distinct from other traits—their potential resistance to response distortion. We estimated response distortion for scales of curmudgeon personality and FFM traits across two quasi-experimental studies. As expected, the score shifts between nonapplicant and applicant conditions were smaller for scales of curmudgeon personality compared to scales of emotional stability and conscientiousness. We argue that curmudgeon personality scales may be more resistant to response distortion than are measures of other traits because curmudgeon personality items are semi-implicit and lack an obvious desirable response. The resistance to response distortion should serve as a call to future researchers to test the criterion validity of curmudgeon personality in regard to performance criteria.     

“Love of same,love of other”

The positions in feminist theory and theology tend to be polarized between so‐called essentialists and constructionists. Yet, despite apparent anthropological dissension, both parties try to substantiate political and ecclesiastical claims through definitions: what is sexual difference, what is gender, what is a woman, what is she not. For the purpose of mending how we usually approach these questions, I claim instead that the most important theological issue in the realities of males and females is not that their bodies “work” differently, nor that their social positions usually are different and “mean” differently in different cultures, but that they take part in the constitution, recreation and representation of different human subject positions of which there are everywhere and always at least two. My tentative arguments are developed from engaging with the Swiss theologian Karl Barth and the French philosopher Luce Irigaray.     

What do the MMPI scales fundamentally measure? Some hypotheses

I consider the question of whether all psychopathological behaviors can, on an evolutionary foundation, be considered as positive adaptations. I proposed that higher functions can be differentiated from their associated emotional modulations at simultaneous subjective, behavioral, and neural levels and that organizing analyses in this way will enable us to fill in our understanding of both the effects and relief of traumatic experiences. I then present each of the 8 clinical scales of the MMPI (Hathaway & McKinley, 1943) as a dimension of positive adaptation with simultaneous cognitive-emotional, operant-classical, and neocortical-limbic elements. A variety of life-experience paradigms are then offered to explain the factors that operate to increase MMPI scale elevations as well as countermeasures that can operate to reduce such elevations. Understanding all such behaviors as adaptive leads to a notable enhancement of empathy.     

Discriminant validity of the Conners’ scales for ADHD subtypes

Differential diagnosis and treatment of children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) remains difficult and controversial, particularly when children present with concomitant academic and behavior problems. Describing a sample of 184 chil-dren referred for evaluation in a university-affiliated outpatient pediatric clinic, this study subsequently examined the discriminant validity of the Conners’ parent and teacher rating scales for ADHD subtypes with and without comorbid conditions. Although discriminant analyses suggest several Conners’ subscales help differentiate subtypes, multimethod evaluations using a variety of data sources are necessary for accurate identification and classification of the disorder with and without comorbid conditions. These data were previously reported at the 107^th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Boston, Massachusetts. The authors express gratitude to Ross D. Crosby, Ph.D., Director of Biomedical Statistics and Methodology at the Neuropsychiatrie Research Institute, for his pre-submission review of the article.     

Migration for love? Love and intimacy in marriage migration processes

According to Australian regulations, the right to marriage migration applies only to genuine relationships. Marriage migration couples must demonstrate to state agents the authenticity of their romantic attachments in order to achieve a positive outcome in their applications. This article examines how love and intimacy in the context of Australian immigration regulations are interpreted by Thai women who originate from a non-Western culture. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic work with 15 Thai women marriage migrants, this article illustrates the ways in which the practical actions of caring and sharing are mobilized as important strategies for expressing real love and intimacy in marriage migration processes. Thus, although these women narrate their migration experiences as based on love and intimacy, such narratives are not free from global economic and structural inequalities. Women's constructions of love and intimacy presented here can transform over time in response to new personal experiences, changing social contexts and fluctuating circumstances in the processes of marriage migration.     

Why perversion?: False love and the perverse pact1

In this paper, the author works with the awareness that perversion is a socially, historically and theologically loaded term, at the same time as it may be the latest frontier in psychoanalysis, both clinically, and in relation to contemporary art and culture which emphasize the perverse. Positioning itself against tendencies to deny the existence of a category of perversion or, inversely, to abuse it for the power that accrues from the act of diagnosing, she also points to other liabilities in the history of the treatment of this term, such as the narrowing down of perversion to the exclusively sexual domain, or, alternatively, the overextension of it to polymorphously erotic practices that enhance sexual excitement. The paradoxes of perversion and the difficulties of distinguishing the perverse from the non‐perverse are addressed. The case is also made that, in order to understand perversion, one must unlink it from the narrow notion of sexual practice and see what is involved on a deeper level an approach initiated when psychoanalysis turned to perversion as a defense against psychotic anxieties, and began considering the necessary place of perversion in the transference countertransference. Two features common to both sexual and non‐sexual perverse relations are the seductive and bribing aspects of perversion, and its means‐ends reversal. Perversion is a haven for the disguising of hatred and suspicion as excitement and (false) love. Displaced child and beating father, entitled child and seductive mother, are both prototypes of psychoanalytic refiection on parents who excite, deceive and corrupt their children and establish perverse pacts with them. The notion of the perverse pact is foregrounded in Alice's analysis, where first the resurrection and then the dismantling of such a pact were effected through various analytic means.