Psychology Chapter Love Styles and Attachments

Love and Relationships

• Berscheid and Hatfield-Walster (1969) proposed two broad categories of love: passionate and companionate love.
• Passionate love involves extreme absorption, often with mood swings ranging from ecstasy to anguish, and fear of losing the other person.
• Companionate love is a calmer, deeper, and perhaps more unshakable affection. It's characterized by mutual self-disclosure, intertwined lives, and warmth or peace.
• Passionate love is often seen as fragile and diminishing quickly, while companionate love is believed to be enduring.
• However, Hatfield (1988) argued that both passionate and companionate love can exist simultaneously in successful and satisfying relationships.
• Research by Hatfield and colleagues (2008) with 53 newlywed couples showed both types of love to exist at relatively high levels initially, with some decrease over a year, but not necessarily equally.

Love Styles

• Susan and Clyde Hendrick (1986) proposed six love styles.
• Eros emphasizes passionate love, an irresistibly strong attraction, and often obsession with thoughts and feelings about the other person. This intense feeling is reflected frequently in songs, poems, and novels.
• Ludus describes "game playing" or flirtatious love. People experience attraction but lack commitment, potentially having multiple lovers simultaneously or playing hard to get.
• Storge is companionate love, emphasizing commitment and enduring warmth and affection between partners.
• Pragma highlights practical love, focusing on a partner's objective qualities like financial security or parenting potential rather than emotional passion.
• Mania involves painful love, characterized by jealousy and dependence. It resembles eros but also includes significant distress or pain.
• Agape describes selfless love, emphasizing giving rather than receiving and a focus on another person's well-being.

The Love Triangle

• Robert Sternberg (1996) developed a triangular theory of love, identifying three dimensions: intimacy, passion, and commitment.
• Intimacy includes feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness, crucial to companionate love. It's an emotional experience.
• Passion refers to physical and sexual attraction, often aligning with the Eros love style. It motivates action in a relationship.
• Commitment represents the decision to maintain love despite difficulties and possible ups and downs. It's cognitive and involves belief in the relationship's value.
• From different combinations of these dimensions, various types of love emerge, including liking, romantic love, companionate love, infatuation, fatuous love, and consummate love.
• Research (Sorokowski et al., 2020) across 25 countries supported the triangular theory's findings regarding the relative importance of these aspects in various types of relationships. Passion was strongest in short-term relationships, while commitment was linked more strongly to longer-term relationships.

Love 2.0

• Barbara Fredrickson (2001) views love as the "supreme emotion" accompanied by other positive emotions like joy, happiness, and gratitude, differing from other emotions primarily due to its interpersonal nature.
• It's described as a moment-to-moment experience of warm and mutual caring characterized by a sincere investment in the other person's well-being.
• Real love involves "shared positivity," linking brain activity and synchronised behaviour between individuals who have a positive emotional connection. Research (Liu et al., 2017), supports this, illustrating brain synchrony through functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).

Biological Mechanisms of Love

• Fredrickson suggests two biological mechanisms: oxytocin and vagal tone.
• Oxytocin, a hormone, enhances social sensitivity and generosity. It's released in response to positive social encounters, fostering trust.
• Vagal tone, representing parasympathetic activity of the vagus nerve, influences heart rate variability. Moderate vagal tone is associated with prosocial behavior (Kogan et al., 2014, Stellar et al., 2015) and the ability to focus on others. High vagal tone is linked to elevated stress.

The Impact of One's Social Network

• A strong social network is associated with improved psychological well-being.
• Studies, including that by Diener and Seligman (2002), highlight how happiness is linked to a diminished amount of time spent alone. Also, relatively few high-quality friendships can significantly predict happiness (Lucas & Dyrenforth, 2006; Demir & Weitekamp, 2007).
• Spread of happiness can even occur between individuals three connections away (Fowler & Christakis, 2008).

Friendships

• Friendships are voluntary interdependence driven by interpersonal needs like intimacy, support, and self-validation (Demir et al., 2015).
• Frequency of friendships is highly prevalent from preschool to adulthood (Hartup & Stevens, 1999; Hartup & Stevens, 1997).
• The quality of friendships can predict happiness better than the quantity (Brannon et al., 2013; Berry & Hansen). The closeness of friendships is highly correlated with well-being (Demir et al., 2007).

Online Relationships

• Social media can influence well-being in teenagers. While engagement can bring positive feelings of happiness, amusement, and connection (Weinstein, 2018), feelings of jealousy, being left out, anxiety, irritation and upset can also emerge; while using social media.
• Social interactions online can be a "see-saw" between connection and disconnection, impacting well-being in a less consistent way than other social interactions (Orben, 2020). Active use is positively correlated to well-being while passive online use is negatively correlated to well-being (Verduyn et al., 2017).

Marital Status

• Being married is generally associated with greater psychological well-being, on average (Becker et al., 2019). Longitudinal studies highlight that transitioning from single to married can result in increased well-being (Haring-Hidore et al., 1985).
• However, marriages are often challenging, with 40-50% ending in divorce (Lucas, 2005); and the negative effect of divorce on well-being outweighs the positive effect of marriage.
• The positive effects of marriage on well-being appear to be most notable when marriage is viewed as a significant social expectation within an individual's peer culture (Wadsworth, 2016) and are stronger for men, and for younger populations.
• Studies involving LGB individuals suggest that those who are legally married report lower levels of psychological distress, than those in other, non legally recognized relationships (Wight et al., 2013).

Attachment Theory

• Attachment theory describes the emotional bonds formed in childhood and how they influence adult relationships. It centers around relationships with caregivers.
• Four types of attachment in infancy exist: secure, anxious-ambivalent, avoidant, and disorganized.
• Secure attachment is associated with greater happiness, social maturity in teens, and better relationships in adults.
• Anxious and avoidant attachment styles are associated with different relationship histories, beliefs, and behaviors in adulthood.
• Disorganized attachment may be associated with higher risks of aggression, antisocial behaviour, psychopathology, physical illness as adults.
• Newer research (e.g., Dinero et al., 2008) suggests that the connection between infant attachment style and adult relationship behavior may not always be strong or consistent over time.

Social Exchange Theories

• Social exchange theories propose that relationship decisions involve weighing the benefits and costs of interpersonal relationships.
• Based on a comparison of the benefits/costs involved in the current relationship, to the benefits/costs available in other potentially better (or less costly) relationships.
• Thibault and Kelley (1959) proposed two main factors, Comparison Level and Comparison Level for Alternatives.
• Factors influencing commitments to relationships, additionally, are satisfaction factors, and investment size by Caryl Rusbult.
• Criticisms of social exchange theories include their inability to fully explain prosocial actions driven by altruism.

Balance Theory of Relationships

• Gottman (1993) suggested that relationship stability and satisfaction depend on a balance between positive and negative interactions.
• A balance of negative and positive interactions is crucial for stable, long-term relationships. Relationships that balance positive and negative interactions are more stable.
• Gottman’s “magic ratio” suggests a 5:1 positive to negative interaction ratio as ideal; higher ratios are better for lasting relationships. Hostile couples are those who get into the same arguments, over and over again; and, hostile-detached couples, exhibit a degree of unregulated behaviour, leading to lack of balance. .

This quiz explores various love styles and attachment theories detailed in psychology. Examine your understanding of pragma love, jealousy in relationships, and the characteristics of secure and anxious attachment styles. Dive into Sternberg's triangular theory and the dynamics of relationship satisfaction.