Refuting Six Misconceptions about Romantic Love

Scientific research on romantic love has been relatively sparse but is becoming more prevalent, as it should. Unfortunately, several misconceptions about romantic love are becoming entrenched in the popular media and/or the scientific community, which hampers progress. Therefore, I refute six misconceptions about romantic love in this article. I explain why (1) romantic love is not necessarily dyadic, social, or interpersonal, (2) love is not an emotion, (3) romantic love does not just have positive effects, (4) romantic love is not uncontrollable, (5) there is no dedicated love brain region, neurotransmitter, or hormone, and (6) pharmacological manipulation of romantic love is not near. To increase progress in our scientific understanding of romantic love, I recommend that we study the intrapersonal aspects of romantic love including the intensity of love, that we focus our research questions and designs using a component process model of romantic love, and that we distinguish hypotheses and suggestions from empirical findings when citing previous work.

A dataset for emotional reactions and family resilience during COVID-19 isolation period among Indonesian families

This study presents a survey dataset describing families' conditions during the COVID-19 isolation period obtained from individuals who serve as parents. A survey was conducted to measure the family's positive or negative emotional reactions and the degree of their resilience. The data were categorized into age, sex, type of family, family size, length of marriage, family's environment, and family COVID-19 status. The samples were gathered from 365 parents of Indonesian students who were willing to fill an online questionnaire. SPSS v.23.0 was used to carry out descriptive statistics and intercorrelations. Additional results from chi-square analyses are available as supplemental tables in the Mendeley repository.

Perceived ability to regulate love

Research has shown that romantic love can be regulated. We investigated perceptions about love regulation, because these perceptions may impact mental health and influence love regulation application. Two-hundred eighty-six participants completed a series of items online via Qualtrics that assessed perceived ability to up- and down-regulate, exaggerate and suppress the expression of, and start and stop different love types. We also tested individual differences in perceived love regulation ability. Participants thought that they could up- but not down-regulate love in general and that they could up-regulate love in general more than down-regulate it. Participants thought that they could up-regulate infatuation less than attachment and sexual desire. Participants also thought that they could exaggerate and suppress expressions of infatuation, attachment, and sexual desire, but that they could not start and stop infatuation and attachment, or start sexual desire. The more participants habitually used cognitive reappraisal, the more they thought that they could up- and down-regulate infatuation and attachment and up-regulate sexual desire. The more participants were infatuated with their beloved, the more they thought that they could up- but not down-regulate infatuation, attachment, and sexual desire. Finally, participants thought that they could up- and down-regulate happiness more than infatuation These findings are a first step toward the development of psychoeducation techniques to correct inaccurate love regulation perceptions, which may improve mental health and love regulation in daily life.

The Nonverbal Communication of Positive Emotions: An Emotion Family Approach

This review provides an overview of the research on nonverbal expressions of positive emotions, organised into emotion families, that is, clusters sharing common characteristics. Epistemological positive emotions (amusement, relief, awe, and interest) are found to have distinct, recognisable displays via vocal or facial cues, while the agency-approach positive emotions (elation and pride) appear to be associated with recognisable visual, but not auditory, cues. Evidence is less strong for the prosocial emotions (love, compassion, gratitude, and admiration) in any modality other than touch, and there is little support for distinct recognisable signals of the savouring positive emotions (contentment, sensory pleasure, and desire). In closing, some limitations of extant work are noted and some proposals for future research are outlined.

What is This Thing Called Love?

Lamy probing rich analysis focuses more on the criteria necessary to spark or produce a potential lover’s readiness to “fall in love.” His analysis is silent, however, about the feeling state of congeniality or mutual attachment. This raises the intriguing question: if romantic love requires some form of cognitive realization or awareness of the love object, then does long-time companionship or comfort love anchored in a deep attachment have a similar cognitive horizon?

Demystifying the Neuroscience of Love

Scholars from different disciplines have investigated the nature of love for centuries. It has been only in the past century that social psychologists have begun to scientifically investigate the complexity of love in comparison with other emotions (Hatfield & Rapson, 2009, for review). We laud Lamy (2016) for his thoughtful intentions to pursue this long-lasting tradition and extend his goal to better understand the definition and neural bases of love by focusing on recent scientific evidence from social psychology and neuroscience. The better is our understanding of love, the greater is our respect for its significant role in mental and physical health.

An Inspiration for Expanding the Self-Expansion Model of Love

Lamy’s view coincides with much of the self-expansion model of love, but also suggests potential interesting directions for expanding it and integrating it with other ideas. These include the potential role of anticipated rapid self-development through falling in love itself being a self-expansion motivation, which although consistent with the model, has not been fully tested; and the potential role of stories/scripts of love, which although existing in the literature, have been minimally integrated with other lines of work and not at all with the self-expansion model.

“Beyond Emotion: Love as an Encounter of Myth and Drive” by Lubomir Lamy

The author comments on and criticizes some conclusions of the article by Lubomir Lamy entitled “Beyond Emotion: Love as an Encounter of Myth and Drive.” In addition, she shows evidence that love may be considered an integrated neurobiobehavioral process and, as such, regulated by neural systems and circuits that underlie its emotional, cognitive, and behavioral expressions.