Notion of Love in Psychology - Coursework Example

Prof Topic: Love in psychology. Love is a many-splendored thing, It's the April rose that only grows in the early spring, Love is nature's way of giving a reason to be living, The golden crown that makes a man a king. Once on a high and windy hill, In the morning mist two lovers kissed and the world stood still, Then your fingers touched my silent heart and taught it how to sing, Yes, true love's a many-splendored thing. (Frank Sinatra) Frank Sinatra sang this song with soulful depths in a tender expression of arrayed symbols to employ meanings on love. Love is a deep emotional feeling no language could fully describe. It is a burning force, a compelling passion, an innate vacuum wanting to be filled, a desire drawing vigor for momentum, something that reassures, or often a perplexing but fascinating contradiction. Love is too enthralling that millions of people resulted to find varied ways and strategies just to find the idealized partner. Many have strong preference to look at love as a positive force that fills the existential vacuum, but many of them are also experientially eluded to truly feel and perceived true love. At times, gender relations illustrate power play in relationships: of submissiveness and domination. Female does the former and the male does the later. It has varying perception from male, female, gay, lesbian or of those coming from transsexual gender. But most of them felt how love entails joy, happiness, and hurt. There is a mystical concept in it, maybe because of its association to fantastic fairy tales. Lovers would even seize distance just to be with the beloved; or to find wisdom from good or bad relationship; or to simply feel the void in the lover’s absence. But its amazing how one could find someone to love from billions of people walking in all busy lanes. Love’s history is immortalized by time and its details are enshrined in all historic evolution of events in many civilizations. Rubin (1975) thought that romantic love is made holistic by three elements: attachment, caring, and intimacy. Attachment is a state of belongingness where care is felt and there is direct communication for cognitive and emotive responses. It is a comfort zone, a security base, a sacred breathing space. It is considered as passion. The absence of attachment caused certain level of instability of emotions and psyche. Caring on the other hand relate to humanistic-altruistic value of being sensitive to another’s happiness. Intimacy refers to the bond established through sharing of thoughts, desires, and feelings with each other. Hatfield, Cacioppo, Rapson, and Clark (1992) categorized love into compassionate and passionate love. Compassionate love refers to the capacity of person to understand and to be receptive of the language of the heart with respect and trust. Compassionate love usually develops out of feelings of mutual understanding and shared respect for each other. Passionate love on the other hand is an intense feeling with physiological awareness of the beloved. Reciprocation of these feelings meant fulfillment and the person is preconceived as an ideal lover. Hatfield et.al. (1992) believed that passionate love is transitory and could only last within the period from 6 to 30 months. Meanwhile, Lee (1973) explicated love by associating its concepts to primary colors: eros, ludos, and storge. He believed that love is a combination of these three. For instance, the combination of eros and ludos meant an obsessive love. A combination of ludos and storge could result to realistic love, a pragma. Eros and storge combined would also mean selfless love. Religious leaders call this agape, an ideation of love in the image of God. Lee (1973) further explained that eros meant loving an ideal person; ludos meant love as a game; and storge meant love as friendship. Sternberg (1996) professed that relationships are built on elements that endure and are called consummated love as a description of intimacy, passion, and commitment. Rubin (1973), a social psychologist argued that in describing a phenomenon, such as love for instance, involves understanding human behaviors. Often, persons sharing love would spend substantial amount of time together; held each others eyes longer and prefer each others’ nearness to feel the sense belongingness and be complete. The descriptive time studied about love becomes an operational definitions of data for suppose scientific precision. Psychologists explicated that there are logical processes built on theories and precept—a flow of rationally explained patterns of predictable behaviors. For instance, it is perceived that lovers prefer to hold each others eyes because of reward theory – believing that doing some intimate acts is rewarding. Lovers begot attention, gifts, sex, status or a state of belongingness that suddenly uplifts life’s solitude. Other theory posits that being a lover is therapeutical; a healing process because sharing love is baring that what is innately felt . This inner state is often referred by psychologists as intervening variables, an invisible condition that relates to observable motivation that calls for responses. Love is invisible but the expression of being held by the eyes is an observable action (Rayner, Pollatsek, Drieghe, Slattery, Reichle, 2007). Love evolves based on the development of theories of psychology including the precept which deals on cause-and-effect phenomena. This relates to the relation of human thoughts and actions. You write because you wanted to be read. You laugh because you are overjoyed. You searched because you wanted to know and see. There is indeed a pattern of actions that can be psychologically inferred with teleological precepts; of interrelations of thoughts and actions to convey meanings. It adds sense of predictability in understanding and theorizing occurrences of passionate relations, which can be subject for validation or disconfirmation (Wright and Mischel, 1987). Lewis, Amini and Lannon (2007) explicated that love and intimacy relates to some scientific confluence of the development of personality to its limbic brain’s function. These theorist argued that human being’s nervous systems is interrelated or is not in isolation to the limbic system and that it is affected by those closest to us (limbic resonance) and synchronizes with them (limbic regulation) (Lewis, Amini and Lannon, 2007). It has a healing presence too that empathetically modify set of patterns (Lewis, Amini and Lannon, 2007). The authors go on to examine how many aspects of our society and social institutions have been constructed in a way that is incompatible with our innate biology, which gives rise to individual and social pathologies (Lewis, Amini and Lannon, 2007). Love sometimes help regulate behaviors of violent persons, those with suicidal tendencies, and those who need psychological attention. This is because love has a psychological appeal to core values that revolve around cognitive, behavioral, psychodynamic, humanistic, biological and sociocultural (William, 1907). The cognitive value deals with peoples psychological processes and how people interpret responses, a structuralist precept that focused on consciousness and the elements of human life (Zimbardo, et. al. 2000). Love is also an observable social phenomenon. Beyond romanticism, love with forgiveness can heal divisions; calm anger; sooth pains and motivate people to gain power. Nations who invest their passion in democratizing the world later enjoy certain level of social cohesion and harmony. Those who are engaged in social works, like Mother Theresa, made love as an instrument of giving hope to the distressed and those who are suffering. In conclusion, it can be said that there is so much in love and to be passionate about. It may be engulfing you personally or it is driving power for societal change. The intricacies of understanding the capacity of human perception and the ability to respond bring meanings to our interpretation of the world and to human being’s contribution to keep this world ticking with love. This does not mean however mean that human being should morphed into anthropocentric creatures, but instead make loving as a process of valuing our interrelationship with the world about us. Such relate to developmental psychology which seeks to understand human behaviors through interaction, heredity and environment. These thoughts help towards greater understanding on moral options: choosing to do right from wrong. It also included a conscious understanding of human beings and our emotional developments to note where love is. REFERENCES Zick Rubin (1975). Disclosing oneself to a stranger: Reciprocity and its limits. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Volume 11, Issue 3, 1975, Pages 233-260 Keith Rayner, Alexander Pollatsek, Denis Drieghe, Timothy J. Slattery, Erik D. Reichle (2007). Tracking the Mind During Reading Via Eye Movements: Comments on Kliegl, Nuthmann, and Engbert (2006) Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Volume 136, Issue 3, August 2007, Pages 520-529 Wright, Jack C.; Mischel, Walter (1987). A conditional approach to dispositional constructs: The local predictability of social behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 53(6), Dec 1987, 1159-1177 James, William (1907) Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. 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Primitive emotional contagion. Emotion and social behavior. Emotion and social behavior, Review of personality and social psychology, Vol. 14 (pp. 151-177). Thousand Oaks, CA, US: Sage Publications, Inc, xi, 311 pp. Lee JA (1988). Love styles. In Barnes MH, Sternberg RJ. The Psychology of love. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press. pp. 38–67. Sternberg, Robert J. (1996).A Triangular Theory of Love. Psychological Review 93.2 (1986): 119-135. Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon (2007). A general theory of love. Vintage Books. UK. Read More