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One way to measure love is to look at behaviors that people engage in to express love.
Chapman (1995) theorized that there were five broad classes of behaviors that people would engage in to express love: (1) words of affirmation, (2) spending quality time, (3) giving gifts, (4) acts of service, and (5) physical touch.
Goff, Goddard, Pointer, and Jackson ...
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To add some general theoretical background...
Answering this is very complicated because the answer depends on how you define emotions, whether you see emotions as latent or emergent, whether you recognize high heterogeneity (behavior, cognition, physiology) within emotion categories, whether you view emotions as circumscribed in the brain or emerging from ...
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I'm including some relevant papers below, but one important thing to note abot this whole compassion/Buddhism/neuroscience discussion is that neuroscience may not necessarily have the most to say about developing empathy/love/compassion (ELC), especially as compared to "real-world," social psychological, or behavioral measures linking prosocial behavior to ...
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You are quite astute to have noticed the difference between your stated preferences and actual preferences - most people don't. Yes, there has been a fair bit of research on prediction techniques and their effectiveness.
In 2008, in a study by Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel, participants were asked to predict their romantic preferences - what they found ...
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This BBC documentary reviews a number of methods for measuring love that have enjoyed some success. To summarize:
Dr. Angela Rowe of the University of Bristol presents subjects with unfavourably distorted, unindistorted, and favourably distorted photographs of their love partners, and asks them to identify the undistorted one. Subjects in love tend to ...
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[Edit]: Parts of this answer respond to removed content in older versions of the OP, and to comments. The current version of the OP deserves some elaboration of this answer. (And, IMHO, other answers too!)
There are other spiritual "worlds" than those that are dualistic. By common psychological definitions of spirituality, the existence of an "...
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Self-reported number of selfies has been found to correlate positively with some measures of narcissism in US men (Fox and Rooney, 2015).
Fox, J., & Rooney, M. C. (2015). The Dark Triad and trait self-objectification as predictors of men’s use and self-presentation behaviors on social networking sites. Personality & Individual Differences, 76, ...
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Another component, which relies less on situations from one's past, are the effects of perceived scarcity. A paradigm in behavioral psychology which has become almost universally accepted is that the more scarce and hard to come by something is (be it a certain model of car, or the affection of another individual), the more valuable we perceive it to be. ...
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A Love Circuit?
The idea that there is a "love circuit" has little evidence (for or against it). But in general studies that look at "love" (however defined) reveal broad activation across multiple intrinsic neural networks that are involved in many different cognitive processes (in favor of a constructivist view of emotions).
Consider the image from a ...
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All attraction involves the brain. The brain is responsible for consciousness, perception, and motivation.
Not all attraction is physical. In two structural theories of love with which I'm familiar, physical attraction corresponds to a minority of what constitutes love. Love isn't exactly the same as attraction, but much of these theories' content implies ...
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You may find Sternberg's triangular theory of love as useful framework for distinguishing different types of love. Quoting wikipedia, the theory describes types of love in terms of three dimensions:
Intimacy – Which encompasses feelings of attachment, closeness, connectedness, and bondedness.
Passion – Which encompasses drives connected to both ...
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A study reported, in the 80's, that unmarried cohabitation prior to marriage was associated with "significantly" lower marital satisfaction, but did not report an effect size. They also reported that the duration of unmarried cohabitation was unrelated to marital satisfaction(DeMaris and Leslie, 1984). A later study by the same lead author from the ...
answered Apr 24 '15 at 17:20
Christian Hummeluhr
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The big hot potato here is the evolutionary hypothesis that men are more sexually jealous whereas women are more emotionally jealous.
Contrast Harris (2003) totally dissing it (but also giving a nice summary of it, which is why I'm quoting it first):
The specific innate modular theory of jealousy hypothesizes that natural selection shaped sexual jealousy as ...
answered Aug 23 '18 at 18:28
SX welcomes ageist gossip
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I long pondered the answer to this question myself. The short answer is: Cognitive Dissonance*
("Cognitive Dissonance" is a hypothesized mental process in which two conflicting ideas are resolved through rationalization / attitude change, instead of addressing the underlying source of the conflict that the person may not be consciously aware of. So here, ...
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Is there a split between desire and love?
Of course, love and lust/desire are two completely different things.
A simple definition I have of the word love: An involuntary response to virtue.
This obviously means I can't "love" someone without knowing whether or not they are honest, benevolent, or have integrity. It also means that I can't love someone if ...
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Step one would be to define what you mean by "soul".
The common Judeo/Christian/Muslim theory is that there is something that (a) is the essential core of a person's personality that is related to the brain but is not synonymous with the electrochemical processes of the brain; and (b) that continues to exist when the body is dead.
If you could prove that ...
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Sternberg's Triangular theory is certainly well-known. The field you want to dig into more is called 'close relationships'. Here's an accessible treatment of other common theories:
Summary of psychological theories of love https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-love-and-war/201208/love-decoded
This gives a good theoretical overview using many ...
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