Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Love: The Quadruple Theory

The Molecular Basis of Love

Love as a complex interplay of emotions and behaviors is underpinned by an intricate network of neurobiological mechanisms. This review provides insight into the molecular basis of love, focusing on the role of key hormones and neuromodulators. The aim of the paper is to report how these biochemical messengers influence various aspects of love, including attraction, attachment, and long-term bonding. By examining the effects of hormones such as dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, and serotonin, we aim to elucidate the intricate relationship between biology and behavior. Additionally, the potential impact of modern lifestyle factors on hormonal balance and their subsequent influence on love and social interactions are outlined. This review provides a useful overview of the molecular underpinnings of love, offering insights into the biological mechanisms that shape human relationships.

Emophilia: psychometric properties of the emotional promiscuity scale and its association with personality traits, unfaithfulness, and romantic relationships in a Scandinavian sample

Emophilia is a suggested stable phenomenon referring to how often and easily an individual falls in love (Jones, 2011). The current study investigated the psychometric properties of the Emotional Promiscuity Scale (EPS, i.e., a measure of emophilia) and its association with personality traits, romantic relationships, and unfaithfulness in a Scandinavian sample. The sample consisted of 2,607 participants, who were recruited through Norwegian and Swedish newspapers. Descriptive analyses of the EPS and a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to verify the previously obtained two-factor structure were conducted. Correlations between emophilia and the Big Five and Dark Triad traits were calculated to investigate the discriminative validity of the EPS. Lastly, negative binomial regression analyses were run in which emophilia comprised the independent variable and the number of romantic relationships and number of times being unfaithful constituted the dependent variables. The EPS had satisfactory internal reliability and the responses to the items were normally distributed. The CFA indicated a two-factor structure, although the two factors correlated highly, justifying collapsing them into one dimension. Emophilia showed satisfactory discriminant validity (r < 00.40) against the personality traits included. Lastly, emophilia was positively associated with the number of romantic relationships and times being unfaithful. Future research should aim to improve our understanding of the psychological and behavioral aspects of emophilia.

Exploring Aromanticism Through an Online Qualitative Investigation With the Aromantic Community: "Freeing, Alienating, and Utterly Fantastic"

Objective

To explore what aromanticism is, common misconceptions about this identity, and the experiences people have connecting with an aromantic identity.

Methods

An online, international open-ended survey with a convenience sample of aromantic individuals (N = 1642) analyzed with thematic analysis.

Results

To identify as aromantic involves a spectrum of experiences with romance commonly tied to experiencing stigma. Connecting with an aromantic identity allows for a greater understanding of the self and a connection to a community.

Conclusions

Future research is needed to explore the experiences and perspectives of this community to gather better understanding of their needs and how to prevent/limit stigmatizing experiences.

What's love got to do with jealousy?

Romantic love and jealousy seem antagonistic, but the expression of both emotions have evolutionary functions that can go in the same direction of maintaining a relationship. Considering natural selection designed adaptations to solve the problems surrounding reproduction, then love and romantic jealousy are emotions aimed at staying cooperative for a period of time, where love solves the adaptive challenges of promoting pair bonding, cooperation, and protecting offspring; and jealousy is triggered by a threat or the loss of a valuable cooperative relationship, either on behalf of descendants in need of resources, or a close romantic bond. Consequently, understanding love and romantic jealousy points in the same adaptive functional domain of protecting a romantic pair bond. Specifically, love can be comprehended in two different ways and in regard to jealousy. First, conceiving love as the attachment to significant others one develops throughout lifetime, and secondly, it contemplates affective dependence. Results from a sample of single and committed individuals (n = 332) show the predicted positive correlation between attachment and jealousy as stable traits, consistent with previous literature. In addition, there is a non-significant and low correlation, respectively, between attachment and love as a measure of dependence. Furthermore, in the single participants group, jealousy was associated with love. The discussion emphasizes the need for expanding a functional account of love and jealousy as complementary emotions of our human affective endowment. Finally, it would be informative to study attachment as a relational trait and love as a specific affection for a romantic partner that could be manipulated to elucidate the functional design of jealousy.

Motivation of sex workers who provide camming services to engage in sex with their real-life and virtual partners

In this study, the motivations of 80 sex workers who provide camming services (76 females and 4 non-binary/trans/gender fluid individuals; aged from 20 to 49 years, M = 30.68, SD = 6.43; 56.2% married or in a committed relationship, 18.8% in a non-committed relationship and 25% - single) were compared in terms of engaging in sexual activity with their real-life partners versus their virtual partners (predominantly kink-oriented clients). Presented with 16 reasons to engage in sexual activity, the respondents rated the frequency to engage in sex for each of these reasons with their real-life and virtual partners. Results showed that there were five reasons in which there were differences in motivation to engage in sex with real-life versus virtual partners and 11 reasons showed no differences. Specifically, respondents reported engaging in sex more often with their virtual partners to get resources and to experience a specific type of sex (kink), while they reported engaging in sex more often with their real-life partners to experience physical pleasure, motivated by physical desirability of a partner and to express love and commitment. However, for all other reasons that motivate people to engage in sex, including stress reduction, experience seeking, self-esteem boost, social status, revenge, utilitarian reasons, emotional expression, duty or pressure, thrill of the forbidden, mate guarding, and desire to have sex with a person of other gender, respondents engaged in sex equally frequently with their real-life and virtual partners (clients) and there were no statistical differences. This study adds to the existing research on sex work by providing insights into the motivations of sex workers to engage in sex with different partners and demonstrates that apart from common sense differences the reasons to engage in sex with clients and real-life partners are vastly similar.

College students still maintain the traditional Chinese concept of love

A cross-sectional census was conducted on all students at the campus of Inner Mongolia Medical University using a self-administered questionnaire. This study aimed to investigate their love from psychological pressure, behavioral characteristics, social cognition, etc. Our results show that all students cultivate feelings and become lifelong partners as their motivation for love. Among the population with various demographic characteristics, the prevalence of love among disadvantaged groups is low; that is, women are lower than men, and those from rural are lower than those from cities. After balancing areas and gender, mental working families have a high prevalence of love. Instead, students whose parents' high expectations pressure their children to have a high love prevalence. This is due to China's specific historical perspective. Our results suggested that although China has been deeply integrated with the world and has more frequent ideological and cultural exchanges, college students still inherit China's traditional outlook on love.

The Relationships between Character Strengths and Subjective Wellbeing: Evidence from Greece under Lockdown during COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 was first identified in December 2019. As long as this type of coronavirus was new, the main way for governments to avoid the spread of the infection was enforced quarantine. Besides public health protection, quarantine can have a psychological impact on the residents, with main symptoms being angst, anxiety, depressive, and PTSD symptoms. As it has been found that character strengths can promote subjective wellbeing, the purpose of the study was to examine this relationship under the new situation of quarantine in the Greek population in adults who were in quarantine for at least two weeks. The total sample consisted of 354 participants who were aged 18–72-years-old. A total of 263 participants were women (74.3%), 91 were men (25.7%), and 94.6% of them were highly educated. The sample was a convenience sample. The tools used were PANAS, PERMA and finally VIA-114GR. The data analysis was completed using SPSS software version 26.0 (IBM Corp. Released 2019. IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 26.0. Armonk, NY, USA: IBM Corp) and EQS 6.1 (Multivariate Software Inc.: Encino, CA, USA, 2006). The results showed that love, curiosity, persistence, hope, and zest are strongly associated with subjective wellbeing, even in conditions such as quarantine, and can support specific aspects of it.

On the theory of mental representation block. a novel perspective on learning and behavior

Understanding the mechanisms behind memory, learning, and behavior is crucial to human development and significant research has been done in this area. Classical and operant conditioning and other theories of learning have elucidated different mechanisms of learning and how it modulates behavior. Even with advances in this area, questions remain on how to unlearn faulty ideas or extinguish maladaptive behaviors. In this paper, a novel theory to improve our understanding of this area is proposed. The theory proposes that as a consequence of the brain's energy efficiency evolutionary adaptations, all learning following memory consolidation, reconsolidation, and repeated reinforcements or strengthening over time, results in a phenomenon called mental representation block. The implications of this block on learning and behavior are significant and broad and include cognitive biases, belief in a creator or God, close-mindedness, dogmatism, physician misdiagnosis, racism, homophobia, and transphobia, susceptibility to deception and indoctrination, hate and love, artificial intelligence and creativity.