Love as story,love as storytelling

Across three studies, individual differences in the degree to which (a) participants enjoyed autobiographical storytelling with their romantic partners (storytelling enjoyment [SE]) and (b) thought about these relationships in narrative terms (narrative mindset [NM]) were examined in relation to psychological functioning and romantic relationship narratives. Drawing data from over 1,650 participants, relationship satisfaction, certain positive personality traits, and a dimension of secure attachment corresponded with both SE and NM. SE and NM also related to features of participants' relationship narratives. Storytelling and applying a NM to one's love life may carry implications for functioning within the romantic domain.     

Personality, family history, and competence in early adult romantic relationships

The present investigation tested how well family characteristics and the personality traits assessed by the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (A. Tellegen, 1982) measured in late adolescence predict aspects of romantic relationships in early adulthood. Nurturant-involved parenting practices and personality traits were related to observed negative interactions and to couples' reports of relationship quality. These results from a prospective longitudinal study suggest that the origins of competence in romantic relationships can be found both in individual differences in personality (especially in negative emotionality) and in differences in developmental experiences. Discussion further develops an account of relationship success and dysfunction that integrates proximal factors, such as couple interactions, with more distal factors such as personality and socialization experiences.     

Genetic and Environmental Contributions to Individual Differences: The Three Major Dimensions of Personality

ABSTRACT This article deals with the contribution of genetic and environmental factors to individual differences in the three major dimensions of personality (Psychoticism, Extraversion, and Neuroticism) Twin studies indicate, and family studies confirm within limits, the strong genetic determination of these and many other personality factors, additive genetic variance accounting for roughly half the total phenotypic variance On the environmental side, shared family environment plays little or no part, all environmental effects being within-family Assortative mating, important in the formation of social attitudes, has little impact on personality Dominance may be important for Extraversion Epistasis (emergenesis) may account for the comparative low values of dizygotic (DZ) twins' correlations Evidence for differential heritability of traits is present, but not very strong It is concluded that behavioral genetics forms a vital part of the psychological understanding of the causes of individual differences in personality     

Romantic relationships in early adulthood: Influences of family,personality, and relationship cognitions

Two hundred and sixty‐five participants and their romantic partners were involved in a prospective, longitudinal, and multimethod study during the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Guided by the development of the early adult romantic relationships (DEARR) model (Bryant & Conger, 2002), the research (a) investigated mid‐adolescent family experiences and individual differences in personality as predictors of qualities in the early adult romantic union and (b) evaluated the degree to which marital beliefs mediated these associations. Structural equation modeling partially supported the mediating effects of marital beliefs. The findings were generally consistent with the DEARR model, suggesting that it is informative to study early adult romantic relationship functioning within a developmental‐contextual framework, while simultaneously considering the unique effects of personality and relationship cognitions.     

The components of love: Romantic attraction and sex role orientation

Hypotheses derived from both Erich Fromm and the feminist literature linking sex role orientation to type of love experienced were tested in a sample of 123 heterosexual dating couples Five components of love were identified through factor analysis romantic dependency, communicative intimacy, physical arousal, respect, and romantic compatibility Type of love was related to sex role orientation (p 01), with traditionals characterized by romantic dependency and romantic compatibility, while nontraditionals emphasized communicative intimacy Sex differences showed females being more emotionally expressive in then love than males and scoring higher on communicative intimacy (p's < 01)     

Predictors of how often and when people fall in love

A leading theory of romantic love is that it functions to make one feel committed to one's beloved, as well as to signal this commitment to the beloved (Frank, 1988). Because women tend to be skeptical of men's commitment, this view entails that men may have evolved to fall in love first, in order to show their commitment to women. Using a sample of online participants of a broad range of ages, this study tested this sex difference and several related individual difference hypotheses concerning the ease of falling in love. There was mixed evidence for sex differences: only some measures indicated that men are generally more love-prone than are women. We also found that men were more prone to falling in love if they tended to overestimate women's sexual interest and highly valued physical attractiveness in potential partners. Women were more prone to falling in love if they had a stronger sex drive. These results provide modest support for the existence of sex differences in falling in love, as well as initial evidence for links between several individual difference variables and the propensity to fall in love.     

VALUE ORIENTATIONS IN HETEROSEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS

It is often suggested that men and women have divergent orientations toward love relationships. A questionnaire study of 130 university students demonstrated that their values about romantic relationships comprise two distinct, orthogonal dimensions reflecting concerns with intimacy and with independence. However, results challenge the stereotype that whereas women are more concerned with close-knit attachments, men are more eager to maintain personal autonomy. In actuality, no sex differences were found in attachment values, and women gave significantly more importance than did men to equal sharing and maintaining their personal autonomy. Also examined were individual and dyadic correlates of these value dimensions. Results suggest that dimensions of attachment and egalitarian autonomy provide a useful way to conceptualize individual differences in orientations toward love relationships.     

Reduced cognitive control in passionate lovers

Passionate love is associated with intense changes in emotion and attention which are thought to play an important role in the early stages of romantic relationship formation. Although passionate love usually involves enhanced, near-obsessive attention to the beloved, anecdotal evidence suggest that the lover’s concentration for daily tasks like study and work may actually be impaired, suggesting reduced cognitive control. Affect might also contribute to changes in cognitive control. We examined the link between passionate love and cognitive control in a sample of students who had recently become involved in a romantic relationship. Intensity of passionate love as measured by the Passionate Love Scale was shown to correlate with decreased individual efficiency in cognitive control as measured in Stroop and flanker task performance. There was no evidence that affective changes mediate this effect. This study provides the first empirical evidence that passionate love in the early stages of romantic relationship is characterized by impaired cognitive control.     

Family myths in romantic fiction

Three types of myths frequently appearing in contemporary romantic fiction deal with traditional family values, spousal relationships, and love. Several myths belonging to each type are illustrated and analyzed. It is argued that by naturalizing some behaviors and idealizing others, romantic novels not only may indoctrinate their readers with a patriarchal ideology but also may inculcate upon them pathogenic family processes.     

Why Are Siblings So Different? The Significance of Differences in Sibling Experiences Within the Family

Siblings, who are 50% similar genetically and grow up within the same family, nevertheless differ markedly in personality and psychopathology, and most of these sibling differences cannot be explained by genetic factors. These findings from the field of behavioral genetics imply that within-family processes that lead to sibling differences, called nonshared environment, are crucial for understanding environmental influences on individual development. Such nonshared environmental influences cannot be identified by the conventional strategy of comparing one child per family on a family-by-family basis; what is needed are studies of siblings that focus on why they are so different. The implications of these findings for investigating family process are outlined, and research is reviewed that explores the extent to which siblings in a family have different experiences, and that begins to assess links between such differential experiences and developmental outcomes.     

Environment and genes. Determinants of behavior

Recent behavioral genetic research has demonstrated that genetic influence on individual differences in behavioral development is usually significant and often substantial and, paradoxically, also supports the important role of the environment. This article reviews research on the heritability of intellectual factors, personality factors, and psychopathology. It discusses the importance of investigating within-family environmental differences in order to understand the environmental origins of individual differences in development.     

人格研究中的行为遗传学取向的发展

人格的行为遗传学研究,是以研究遗传和环境的差异来解释人格的个体差异的程度为目的,为探讨遗传和环境在个体发展中的作用提供了新的研究途径。该文以天性和教养为突破口,紧紧围绕行为遗传学在人格研究领域的发展脉络:遗传力、环境、特定基因的研究,进一步探讨在个体人格发展过程中遗传和环境的交互作用的关系。     

Tender Mercies: Love,Oatmeal, and the Quest for Wholeness

Tender Mercies (1983) is a simple and quiet film that reveals a complexity in its depiction of the many forms love can assume in the soul. Using some of C. G. Jung's and Robert Johnson's observations on the dynamic nature of love, the article tracks the plot of Horton Foote's award-winning screenplay as it unfolds the qualities of love, beginning with romantic love, the most popular form our current culture depicts and promotes, as well as perhaps less glamorous and outwardly exciting forms that nonetheless ground the soul in fuller, more sustainable relations between couples, father and daughter, father and son, as well as the deep passion for what excites and sustains us as creative persons. It also touches on the infernal form of addiction as a kind of fixed and fixated love that harbors no freedom for the individual; an addiction is understood as pornographic to the extent that it continues to promise what it cannot ever deliver, so the individual is always hooked by its fury. By looking closely at various scenes from the film, the author articulates the slow retrieval of one soul from addiction to a life full, whole, and satisfying in its creative and familial love.     

Discriminant measures for desperate love

Viewing desperate love as marked by urgency, neediness, dependence, a great need for reciprocation, indealization, and affective extremes, personality traits leading to desperate love were examined. A sample of 251 undergraduates, in desperate love, nondesperate love, and random groups, completed several questionnaires examining characteristic qualities of self and important others and attitudes toward love (Desperate Love Scale, Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, Knox-Sporakowski Attitudes Toward Love Scale, Characteristic Qualities Questionnaire). Findings support both the primary hypothesis that people can be differentiated in their experience of desperate love based upon significantly different responses when describing characteristic qualities of self and important others and the secondary hypothesis that those tending toward desperate love have a more romantic attitude toward love. The study can be taken as an indication that latent qualities, as well as manifest behavior, differentiate someone who experiences desperate love.     

Of lust and love: Beliefs about the role of sexual desire in romantic relationships

Little is known about the beliefs that men and women have about the role of sexual desire in romantic relationships, despite the interpersonal and individual significance of those beliefs. Three experiments conducted with students from a university in the midwestern United States examined both the perceived consequences of sexual desire for romantic relationships and beliefs about the association between sexual desire and romantic love. Men and women believed that dating partners who desire each other sexually are more likely to experience romantic love and other “positive” interpersonal events and less likely to experience “negative” events than partners who do not desire each other sexually, regardless of their level of sexual activity (Experiment 1). Similarly, partners who are romantically in love were viewed as more likely to desire each other than were partners who love or who like one another, and desire was perceived as equally likely to occur in loving and liking relationships; that is, sexual desire did not differentiate these two affective syndromes (Experiment 2). In couples with a mismatched sexual desire pattern, the high-desire partner was perceived as more likely than the sexually uninterested partner to be in love, satisfied, committed, happy, and jealous, whereas the low-desire partner was viewed as more likely to terminate the relationship and to be unfaithful (Experiment 3). These results suggest that sexual desire is viewed as an important feature of romantic love, and that its presence or absence in a dating relationship is believed to have implications for the emotional tenor and interpersonal dynamics of that relationship.     

Experimenter Attributes as Determinants of Subjects' Responses

Viewing desperate love as marked by urgency, neediness, dependence, a great need for reciprocation, indealization, and affective extremes, personality traits leading to desperate love were examined. A sample of 251 undergraduates, in desperate love, nondesperate love, and random groups, completed several questionnaires examining characteristic qualities of self and important others and attitudes toward love (Desperate Love Scale, Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, Knox-Sporakowski Attitudes Toward Love Scale, Characteristic Qualities Questionnaire). Findings support both the primary hypothesis that people can be differentiated in their experience of desperate love based upon significantly different responses when describing characteristic qualities of self and important others and the secondary hypothesis that those tending toward desperate love have a more romantic attitude toward love. The study can be taken as an indication that latent qualities, as well as manifest behavior, differentiate someone who experiences desperate love.     

Index to Volume 140

Abstract

University students from France and the United States completed the Hobart (1958) and Knox-Sporakowski (1968) scales measuring attitudes toward romantic love. Significant differences between the two samples were found, with the French placing higher value on chivalrous behavior by men and on jealousy as a measure of commitment. The French were also significantly more likely than the Americans to perceive love as irrational and as a cause of jealousy and clouded judgment, agreeing that it is too emotional an experience to be studied objectively. Gender differences interacted with cultural perspectives on several measured dimensions of romantic love.     

Behavioral genetic methods

Traditional behavioral genetic methods involve the use primarily of family, twin, and adoption correlations to estimate the relative contributions of genetic and environmental influences in the etiology of individual differences. These methods and representative results for personality are described. However, newer methods are emphasized: structural models and model-fitting, multivariate analysis, genetic change and continuity in development, shared and non-shared components of environmental variance, and genetic components of "environmental" variation. Because most applications of these behavioral genetic methods to the study of personality involve self-report omnibus questionnaires, an important direction for future research in this area is to use these methods to explore new issues and new measures that have emerged from personality theory and research during the past decade.     

Love and anger in romantic relationships: a discrete systems model

In a study of 124 dating couples, we tested a discrete systems model of the functions of two emotion systems in romantic relationships: love and anger/upset. This model posits that the operation of these systems reflects adaptations shaped by natural selection to solve different adaptive problems. Accordingly, we hypothesized that the love and anger/upset emotion systems would be largely independent in the classes of information they track in romantic relationships, in the psychological mechanisms that process that information, and in the resultant behavior generated. Consistent with the discrete systems model, and in contrast to a competing "crossover" model, differences across relationships in feelings of love covaried with differences in strategic facilitation but not in strategic interference by partners. Similarly, differences in feelings of anger/upset during conflict covaried with differences in strategic interference but not strategic facilitation. In turn, feelings of love predicted commitment-promoting behavior but not partner-directed aggression, whereas levels of anger/upset predicted aggression but not commitment. As also predicted by our model, the love and anger/upset emotion systems converged to predict relationship satisfaction.     

Romantic love and sexual desire in close relationships

Drawing on recent claims in the study of relationships, attachment, and emotion, the authors hypothesized that romantic love serves a commitment-related function and sexual desire a reproduction-related function. Consistent with these claims, in Study 1, brief experiences of romantic love and sexual desire observed in a 3-min interaction between romantic partners were related to distinct feeling states, distinct nonverbal displays, and commitment- and reproductive-related relationship outcomes, respectively. In Study 2, the nonverbal display of romantic love was related to the release of oxytocin. Discussion focuses on the place of romantic love and sexual desire in the literature on emotion.