Attraction and Intimacy

Social Psychology

Love

  • Rollo May: to care, to recognize the essential humanity of the other person, to have an active regard for that personā€™s development

  • Fromm: union with somebody outside of oneself under the conditions of retaining the separateness and integrity of oneā€™s own self

  • Psych today: word we use to gloss over the amazingly diverse chuchu blah blah

  • no one single definition of love

  • love unfolds and reveals

Brain in Love

Ostracism

  • a real pain and love is a natural painkiller

  • the act of ignoring or being excluded

  • implicated brain parts: anterior cingulate cortex, right ventral prefrontal

What enables close relationship?

  1. oxytocin - release when in love (?) ambot sad

  2. vasopressin

Helen Fisher

  • lust - estrogen, testosterone

  • attraction - dopamine, NE, SE

Reward Systems

  • ventral tegmental area

  • caudate nucleus

  • nucleus accumbens - impaired prefrontal cortex

for lasting relationship

  • sustain deep attachment

  • communicate, touch with consent

  • say nice or good things to your partner

Factors that lead to liking and loving

  1. Proximity - functional distance, geographical nearness

    a. interaction-functional distance

    • you become friends with ur roommates

    • enables people to explore similarities, sense liking, perception as a social unit

    • availability

    b. anticipation of interaction

    • boosts liking

    • John Darley and Ellen Berscheid (1967): participants preferred the person they expected to meet

    • expecting to date someone also boosts liking

    • adaptive

    • anticipatory liking - expecting

  2. Familiarity: Mere-exposure effect

    • repeated exposure to a person or any stimuli is often sufficient enough to produce attraction

    • if initial interaction kay negative: intensify initial dislike

    • familiarity does not breed contempt, but rather fondness

    • Zajonc (1980): emotions are often more instantaneous than thinking

    • emotions and cognitions are enabled by distinct brain regions

  3. Similarity

    • discovering that others have similar attitudes, values, or traits makes us like them more

    • the more similar others are, the more we like them

    • Trauma bonding ā†’ I-sharing (coined by Pinel)

      • shared subjective experience

    • Donn and Byrne (1971) : the more similar someone's attitudes are to your own, the more you will like the person

      • "At two of Hong Kongā€™s universities, Royce Lee and Michael Bond (1996) found that roommate friendships flourished over a six-month period when roommates shared values and personality traits but more so when they perceived their

        roommates as similar. As so often happens, reality matters, but perception matters more."

  4. Physical Attractiveness

    • also carry desirable traits pag attractive

    • what is beautiful is good

    • we choose someone of the same level of attractiveness (Matching Hypothesis)

    • if hindi same level, may compensating qualities

    • subjective and relative

Pursuing those who are hard to get

  • hard to get - tendency to prefer people who are highly selective in their social choices over those who are more readily available

  • we prefer individuals who are moderately selective than those who have low standards or are too selective

How about love stories that are opposed or forbidden by parents/others?

Theory of Psychological Reactance

  • people react against threats to their freedom by asserting themselves and seeing the threatened freedom as more attractive

  • if you are in a forbidden or opposed one, you might try to reassert yourself by wanting the relationship more

Self-Esteem and Attraction

  • is another personā€™s approval especially rewarding after we have been deprived of approval?

  • Elaine Hatfield: she gave some women either very favorable or unfavorable analyses of their personalities, affirming some and wounding others