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Jun 23, 2017 · The Greek philosopher Empedocles (d. 435 BCE) held that there are four primordial elements: air, earth, fire, and water. These elements are driven together and apart by the opposed cosmic...
Feb 13, 2020 · Fossils tell us that love evolved hundreds of millions of years ago, helping our mammalian ancestors survive in the time of the dinosaurs.
- Overview
- Etymology
- Psychological theories of love
- Biological theories of love
love, an emotion characterized by strong feelings of affection for another arising out of kinship, companionship, admiration, or benevolence. In a related sense, “love” designates a benevolent concern for the good or welfare of others. The term is also used to refer to sexual attraction or erotic desire toward another. Love as an individual emotion...
The word love is derived from the hypothetical term leubh, a root in Proto-Indo-European (the reconstructed parent of Indo-European languages) meaning care or desire. Leubh eventually developed into Latin libet and Old English lufu, which was both a noun and a verb describing deep affection or being very fond of something.
One prominent psychological theory of love, the triangular theory, was introduced in the 1980s by the American psychologist Robert Sternberg. Sternberg argued that love has three emotional components: intimacy, passion, and decision or commitment. Familiar forms or experiences of love can be understood to consist of a single component, different combinations of two components, or all three components. For example, the love that is characteristic of close friendships or liking consists of intimacy alone; infatuation consists of passion alone; “empty love”—which may exist at an early stage of an arranged marriage or at a later stage of a deteriorating marriage—consists of commitment alone; romantic love consists of intimacy and passion; “companionate” love consists of intimacy and commitment; fatuous love consists of passion and commitment; and consummate, or complete, love consists of a combination of all three components, intimacy, passion, and commitment. Sternberg also held that forms of love consisting of combinations of components tend to last longer than those consisting of single components.
In the 1970s the American social psychologist Zick Rubin developed a conception of love as consisting of attachment, caring, and intimacy and a conception of liking as consisting of closeness, admiration, respect, and warmth. He incorporated these elements into detailed questionnaires of liking and loving whose scalable answers collectively provide a relatively objective measure of the strength and character of liking or loving in a given relationship.
Many biochemists consider love to be a biological process. Positive socializing triggers cognitive and physiological processes that create desirable or beneficial emotional and neurological states. A relationship provides constant triggering of sensory and cognitive systems that prompt the body to seek love and to respond positively to interaction with loved ones and negatively to their absence. Recent biological theories of love, pioneered in evolutionary research by the American anthropologist Helen Fisher, break down love into three biological processes: lust, attraction, and attachment. Lust generally operates through the distribution of the hormones testosterone and estrogen, attraction via the organic compound dopamine and the neurotransmitters norepinephrine and serotonin, and attachment through the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin. For evolutionary biologists, each component of love has an evolutionary basis: lust for encouraging sexual reproduction, attraction for discriminating in favor of healthy mates, and attachment for facilitating familial bonding.
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For additional discussion of love and other emotions from varied scientific perspectives, see emotion.
Feb 13, 2020 · From the historians who traced today’s ideas of romance to ancient Greek philosophy and Arab lyric poetry, to the social scientists who have examined the consequences of finding love through an algorithm, to the scientists who study the love hormone oxytocin, here is what their research reveals about matters of the heart. The evolution of romance.
Apr 8, 2005 · In what follows, theories of love are tentatively and hesitantly classified into four types: love as union, love as robust concern, love as valuing, and love as an emotion. It should be clear, however, that particular theories classified under one type sometimes also include, without contradiction, ideas central to other types.
Ancient Greek philosophers identified six forms of love: familial love , friendly love or platonic love , romantic love , self-love , guest love , and divine or unconditional love . Modern authors have distinguished further varieties of love: fatuous love , unrequited love , empty love , companionate love , consummate love , infatuated love ...
Feb 12, 2019 · Among the ancient Romans, the association between the heart and love was commonplace. Venus, the goddess of love, was credited — or blamed — for setting hearts on fire with the aid of her son Cupid, whose darts aimed at the human heart were always overpowering.
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