rhinoceros
Archon
Gender: 
Posts: 1318
Reputation: 8.34
Rate rhinoceros
My point is ...
  
|
 |
Of love, hate and stories
« on: 2003-02-17 13:07:15 » |
 |
[rhinoceros]
This topic is old stuff, so it probably has been beaten to death in magazines for bleeding hearts. I happened to find the reference in the science section of a sunday paper and then I googled a little bit.
It is about Robert Sternberg's theories of love. There is a "triangular" theory of love (intimacy, passion, commitment), and a "stories" theory of love, which is the one I found more interesting and probably more far-reaching. Sternberg has also a theory of hate.
http://www.yale.edu/rjsternberg
V. Love and Hate
A. Love. I have proposed a triangular theory of love, according to which love has three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment. Different combinations of these three components yield different kinds of love. For example, intimacy and passion together produce romantic love, intimacy and commitment together produce companionate love, passion and commitment together produce fatuous love, and so forth. All three components together produce consummate love. I have also proposed a theory of love as a story, which specifies how people come to form the different love triangles. According to this theory, from early in life, people are exposed to various love stories, and as a function of this exposure and their personalities, they create a hierarchy of preferred stories. Examples of such stories are the business story (love is like a business, with two business partners contributing to the business venture), the collector story (no one person can fulfill all one's love needs, so one needs to collect people who in combination, hopefully, will serve to fulfill those needs), the fairy-tale story (love is a story about a prince and a princess), and the war story (love is war). There are roughly two dozen stories in the theory at present.
Key References:
Sternberg, R. J. (1997). Construct validation of a triangular love scale. European Journal of Scoial Psychology, 27, 313-335.
Sternberg, R. J. (1998). Cupid's arrow. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sternberg, R. J. (1998). Love is a story. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sternberg, R. J., Hojjat, M. & Barnes, M. L. (2001). Empirical aspects of a theory of love as a story. European Journal of Personality, 15, 1-20.
B. Hate. I have proposed a duplex theory of hate, according to which hate has both triangular and story components. The triangular components are negation of intimacy, passion, and commitment. Different combinations of these three components lead to different kinds of hate. For example, burning hate is a combination of all three: The individual cannot imagine intimacy with the target, passionately hates the target, and is cognitively committed to this hate. Examples of stories are the vermin story (e.g., the hate object is like a rat), the rapist story (e.g., the hated object is a rapist, literally or figuratively), and so forth. There are about 20 stories in all in the current version of the theory.
Key Reference:
Sternberg, R. J. (2001). A duplex theory of hate and its application to massacres and genocides. Manuscript submitted for publication.
<snip>
http://www.yale.edu/pace/teammembers/personalpages/bob.html
My research on love has been motivated primarily by two theories: my triangular theory of love and my theory of love as a story. The triangular theory posits that love comprises three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment. Different combinations of these components yield different kinds of love. For example, romantic love is a combination of intimacy and passion, companionate love a combination of intimacy and commitment, fatuous love a combination of passion and commitment, and consummate love involves intimacy, passion, and commitment. People have triangles that characterize the relationships they are in, as well as triangles that characterize the relationships they ideally would like to be in. We have construct-validated this theory, with generally favorable results. For example, couples with compatible triangles tend to be more satisfied in their relationships than are couples with less compatible triangles. All three components are positively predictive of satisfaction in close relationships. The theory of love as a story is based on the notion that almost from the time people are born, they begin to form stories about what we believe love should be. Thus, through watching our parents and television, through reading books, and through all kinds of inputs, we form ideas of what we want from loving relationships. These stories ultimately determine our ideal triangles (in the triangular theory) of love. Examples of stories are mystery stories (desire to be mysterious or attraction to mysterious people), horror stories (attraction to abusive people or people who can be abused), recovery stories (attraction to people who will help us get over difficulties or to people whom we can help get over difficulties), and so on. Construct validation of this theory has been favorable, showing that couples tend to have correlated profiles of stories, and that couples with more similar profiles tend to be more satisfied than those with less similar profiles. Certain stories also tend to be negatively predictive of satisfaction.
<snip>
This Thing Called Love
People know it when they feel it, but can scientists tell us why? Two Yale psychologists are trying.
by Bruce Fellman, February 1994
http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/94_02/love.html
There are a number of Yale researchers examining various aspects of love's mysterious tale. For example, Laura King, an assistant professor of English, is studying medieval texts that warned people about the dangers of romantic love and encouraged them to pursue more spiritually oriented liaisons. Sociologist Joshua Gamson is investigating the phenomenon of homosexuality and the social movements that it has spawned. Susan Treggiari, a visiting professor of history, is looking at love and marriage among the ancient Romans.
Surprisingly, given the University's strength in the neurosciences, there are no Yale physiologists involved in scholarly pursuits of an amorous nature. "Lab rats don't fall in love" explains Eric J. Nestler, the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacology. "There's no appropriate animal model, and it's difficult enough to look at normal human physiology, let alone at some subjective human emotion."
As a psychologist, Sternberg works the middle ground between an approach that would reduce amour to a wiring diagram and a collection of chemicals, and one that looks for universal, but fuzzier truths. The psychologist's research into an area that some feel can't be -- or, at least, ought not to be -- examined scientifically, is, in part, an offshoot of his landmark studies of human intelligence, including The Triarchic Mind: A New Theory of Human Intelligence, published in 1988. Those studies led him to argue that traditional iq tests are not accurate predictors of later career success because they do not take into account such intangible assets as creativity and "street smarts." (He has since developed an alternative test that attempts to do that.) "I'm interested in things that are central to people's lives," he says. "Love is certainly the thing we crave the most and have the most trouble getting, and love also involves a kind of intelligence."
When Sternberg started examining love relationships, in the 1970s, he discovered that ideally each had three major components: intimacy, passion, and commitment. Taken together, the three formed the sides of a triangle, which, when love was mature and balanced, would be of the equilateral variety. And as love grew, so would the triangle's area, with the three equal sides lengthening in equal measure. When a couple is in geometric harmony, the result is what Sternberg calls consummate love.
Of course, such a blissful state is rare. All too often, the sides of the triangle are mismatched, and many times, one of the critical components is missing altogether. There is, for example, infatuation -- passion without intimacy or commitment -- along with romantic love -- intimacy and passion, but no commitment -- and fatuous love -- commitment and passion with no intimacy. There are other possibilities as well, notes Sternberg, who has explored his triangular theory of love in several books and numerous scientific papers."Having compatible triangles matters," says Sternberg. "If one person, say, wants intimacy, and the other person is a distancer, that relationship may be intriguing for a while, but then it gets frustrating. Similarly, if one partner feels commitment is important, and the other person is seeing people all over the place, that gets tiresome."
Another Yale researcher, psychologist Kelly Brownell, has found Sternberg's triangular theory useful as a framework for examining the shape and building blocks of love. In his popular course on human sexuality and intimate relationships, Brownell teaches amour a la Sternberg. "It's pretty much the dominant theory," Brownell explains.
But dominant or not, several years ago, Sternberg realized that it left a key question unanswered. "The triangular theory tells you, almost geometrically, where you are. It doesn't say how you got there," he says. "If you really want to understand love, you have to look at how it develops and evolves."
You have to look at stories.
"The story is who you are," says Sternberg, adding that such lifetime tales are crafted from a wide variety of disparate elements: family experiences, religion, school, watching television and movies, reading, culture in general, and time in the back seat, to name some of the more obvious inputs. "And it's never completed," he says. "Your personal story is very dynamic."
Although everyone's personal narrative is as individual as a fingerprint, Sternberg, by analyzing the thousands of detailed questionnaires he's distributed in the course of nearly 20 years of studying love, has learned that the tales can be grouped into roughly two dozen fundamental categories. Along with the hearts-and-flowers romance, there is what he calls the police story, the mystery, the gardening tale, and the pornographic essay. There are humorous stories, with one partner cast as Johnny Carson and the other playing Ed McMahon, and there are science fiction thrillers in which the plot line calls for a person to team up with someone who seems to be as incomprehensible and strange as an alien from another planet. Some tales are pure Erich Segal; others might have been written by Franz Kafka -- or Stephen King.
Only by understanding one's personal literature, says Sternberg, can a person find a suitable coauthor for an amorous tale. "You have to know your own story," he says, "and it has to mesh with your partner's story."
The psychologist has dubbed one of the fundamental tales "love is an addiction," and like all of the narratives, there are two roles. "The partner who's telling this story needs a mate the way an addict might need cigarettes or drugs, and when he or she finds someone, there's an actual high," says Sternberg, pointing out that such a tale can easily become a tragedy. "If the partner doesn't need to feel needed all the time, there's a risk of suffocation."
Then there's the war story. "You see a couple that's always fighting, and an outsider might wonder, 'what are they doing together?' Well, it works because to them, love is war," says Sternberg, adding that such a match wouldn't succeed if a "Rambo" attempted a long-term liaison with someone whose story was akin to Romeo and Juliet.
"A story isn't necessarily good or bad," says Sternberg. "The important thing in determining the outcome of a relationship is finding someone who fits in as a character in the story you feel comfortable writing." Even so, some forms of interpersonal literature are more likely to succeed than others. A couple may, for instance, be involved in a "love as a fantasy" story, which has one partner expecting a knight in shining armor and the other looking for a princess to save. There are advantages to this way of seeing a relationship -- admiration and respect for each person, and a willingness to walk the extra mile to keep the knight or the princess happy. But coupled with the plus side is a potentially fatal flaw, for reality rarely lives up to anyone's fantasies for long. Unless the participants in this story can temper their expectations, the likelihood of the union's lasting is poor, says Sternberg.
On the other hand, those writing narratives that portray love as gardening, sewing and knitting, or travel have an "excellent" chance to succeed. Gardeners, says Sternberg, are forever nurturing their partner and the relationship (the danger here is overwatering). Knitters continually create and recreate the pattern of their love lives (and only run into trouble when they can't agree on the pattern). Travelers see love as a journey both partners plan and enjoy (a surefire outlook as long as neither has a change in direction).
Sternberg is quick to point out that the story idea is not astrology dressed up in psychological costume. "The acid test is whether or not a theory predicts behavior," he says. "My astrological sign happens to be Sagittarius, and as near as I can tell, it has no influence on who I am. But stories are of great interest to psychologists because they can predict, explain, and help us understand what people will do and why they do it."
<snip>
But instead of interpreting the lack as grounds for despair about the fate of the upcoming generation, Sternberg explains that the avoidance of commitment can be seen as an encouraging sign of intelligence and maturity. "When you're between 18 and 22, you don't really know who you're going to become, and the kind of relationship that might work on a long-term basis is not yet clear," he says. "You can look at it as being realistic." His hope is that when they get ready to settle down, the question they ask a potential partner won't be, "What's your sign?" but rather, "What's your story?"
|
Author
Logged
