It’s the season of love, and many like to celebrate Valentine’s Day. We buy cards and treats to offer as gifts of ‘love’. Is this something you do? I did a little digging about the ’emotion of love’. I’ll paraphrase part of an article summarizing studies on love.
Studies say maternal and romantic love are different forms of the same love and that love is NOT an emotion, it’s a physiological drive that society concludes is an emotion. Love is a complex mental function, interacting with other functions such as memory, attention, and even taste.
We are beginning to understand the addictive nature of love as well as its drive attribute, along with many of its psychological, behavioral, and neurobiological peculiarities. Among the qualities or components of love, perhaps attachment, empathy, altruism, and sexuality are best known as seen in numerous studies on behavioral, hormonal, genetic, or neural components. In general, for people, everyday experience and media exposure tell us that love ought to be an emotion involving deep connection and commitment.
This widespread misinterpretation of love as an emotion has several causes, and unfortunately, it is an error that has been consolidated and disseminated by science. Examples of this include underestimating love in relation to sexuality, as in the influential school of psychoanalysis; insisting on the superiority of willpower over love, commending the commitment that can prolong a marital relationship once the passion diminishes, as in the well-known love triangle theory; or encouraging the belief that love has a limited time period, based in the defense of the children. These and many other misconceptions are extraordinarily serious, because they may cause people enormous suffering and even death.
Love has been dissected with extraordinary precision by scientists and also by poets, but Western societies consider love to be an emotion optionally accompanying sexuality. When researchers ask participants to list states they consider emotions, love is typically near the top of that list. The population ignores the nuances that have been attached to love by scientists, e.g. “motivational force”, “affective state”, “complex feelings” or “impulse drive”.
Whether it is a physiological trait or an emotion, expressing love is a gift we can give one another, no matter what day of the year.
REF: https://bit.ly/3T2SVAI
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Photo Credit: Tanarra Whitewood
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