Implicit factors affecting love intensity in romantic relationships

Implicit Factors and Love: Change in the Intensity of Love Over Time

Every human needs and desires love (caring support), from the time they are born, until they die. It is a basic tenet of philosophy and psychology that the human psyche needs the love and supportive care of a significant person in their lives, in childhood to build up the ego and in adult life to support it. Most humans desire the companionship and close intimacy of another human with which to share life's positive and negative events, to bolster the spirit and assure one of one's worth. When an individual chooses a life partner one expects the sharing and mutual support to continue for the rest of the two lives, but there are many factors that come into play, either immediately or gradually regarding the maintenance of this mutual relationship. One of the partners may be healthy both physically and mentally, while the other may have explicit or implicit factors in their body, brain, or psyche that hinders the on-going partnership and may eventually corrupt and disrupt it. According to the triangular theory of love by Robert J. Sternberg, for humans, love has three subcategories: Intimacy, Passion, and Commitment.

When the intensity of passion changes, there must be a reason for such change. Intimacy is affected by the degree of passion at times, and so is commitment. Therefore these three subcategories may all diminish, or just one may diminish, but the chances are, if any one of these diminishes, it will be determined by implicit, rather than explicit factors. If the feeling of love changes over time, then there must be implicit factors that contribute to such alterations. Discovering and identifying these hidden factors will be the goal of this research.

Implicit factors in a love relationship are those factors that remain unseen, but are crucial in the on-going connection and affiliation of the two people who are in the relationship. Some external or outwardly visible factors are: the attitude of the individuals (if one or both of them is loving and caring of the other), how the two treat each other (with respect or disdain), and the age of the relationship. These explicit factors are obvious determinants in whether the relationship lasts. Negatively, if one or both have no love or do not care for the other, if one is abusive, or if the relationship is just beginning, whether the relationship between two people will last is still a question. However, even if all of the external factors are negative, there are still implicit factors in a relationship that are just as much or more a determinant than these in whether it lasts.

According to Webster's New World Dictionary, Concise Edition, "Implicit" means "suggested or to be understood though not plainly expressed; implied." It also means "necessarily or naturally involved though not plainly apparent or expressed; inherent." The third meaning is "Without reservation or doubt; absolute (implicitly)."

Some of the implicit factors in determining whether a love lasts are: whether the couples are compatible in the beginning (whether both of them expect the relationship to last), the individuals' philosophies concerning love and life (how they react to influences from without), their mental health (the backgrounds of the individuals), and the functioning of the brains of those individuals (genetics and chemicals present or changing in the brain during all phases of the relationship).

Study by Berg and McQuinn

There have been some studies on the implicit factors that play a part in the longevity of love relationships. One that looks at attraction and exchange in dating relationships that either continue or are discontinued was done by John H. Berg and Ronald D. McQuinn at the University of Mississippi. The group who did the study tried to develop measures that enabled one to assess general feelings about a relationship. The study found social exchange behaviors and symbolism in the resources given to and received from the parties. This group measured these variables longitudinally in 38 dating couples. They measured the variables in the first two weeks and then, again four months later.

The study found that the initial measures were highly predictable of future status of the dating couples, either still together or having broken up. This was true in same-sex couples as well as heterosexual couples. The measures found (1) greater love, (2) more relationship-maintaining behaviors, (3) more favorable evaluations of the dating relationship and (4) greater amounts of self-disclosure during the initial contact in couples that stayed together than in those who broke up. These four measures intensified as the couples continued dating. The individuals involved gave and received from their dating partners more particularistic and symbolic resources. Even though the couples, both those who continued dating and those who broke up, reported showed a decrease in the correlation between the love that members reported, those who continued by increasing reports of reward, equity and liking (Berg, p. 942).

As time went by, those who continued to date, compared with those who broke up, reported increasing love for each other, through self-disclosure, through providing one another with rewards and desired resources and continued to evaluate each other positively. They also continued to engage behavior designed to maintain the relationship, while those who were not to remain together showed the opposite pattern, with less love, less rewards, less positive evaluations of each other and fewer attempts to keep the relationship.

According to Kerckhoff and Davis (1962) and Murstein (1970), couples move through "filters" they set up. There is first of all the physical attractiveness filter, then later filters of similarities in attitude and values and finally whether their roles and behaviors mesh to complement each other (Berg, p. 942).

The point that the study makes is that the first signs of progressively more obvious differences were there and discernible in the beginning. The relationships continued to build on these differences and positives, leading to either increased closeness or to dissolution. First impressions evidently count for more than they are given credit for and the study cautions those interested in scientific studies of close relationships not to conclude that first impressions and initial attraction are not relevant for understanding the development of a close relationship (Berg, p. 951).

Study by Jones, Mirenberg, Pelham and Carvallo

Another factor that may enter into whether people are attracted and remain with a partner is whether that partner is like them. A study in implicit egotism in gravitation toward people resembling themselves was done by John T. Jones, Matthew Mirenberg, Brett W. Pelham and Mauricio Carvallo. Jones and his associates assumed that people are more likely to befriend and marry others in close proximity on the basis of other studies by Bossard in 1932, and by Festinger, Schacter and Back in 1950. Similarity was the factor, however, that Jones honed in on in 2004. They wanted to see if people "are disproportionately attracted to others whose attitudes, values and physical characteristics resemble their own." They had found studies by Byme in 1971, Newcomb in 1961 and Vandenberg in 1972 corroborated this idea and believed that others similar to oneself "activate people's positive, automatic associations about themselves" (Jones, p. 665).

Jones, et al. did seven studies, four of them on whether people tend to marry a person with the same first letter of, or name similar to their own first or last name. Studies five through seven were experiments in whether people chose others to support their implicit egotism. This was done by introducing people whose code numbers resembled their birth dates, whose surnames shared letters with their own surnames and whose jersey number had been paired subliminally, with their own names.

Preliminary studies found that people chose foods, cities to live in, states to live in and careers that resembled their names or birth dates to a disproportionate extent (i.e., people having the birth date of 03/03 were disproportionately represented in Three Forks, Montana. The same principle, they speculated, might explain choices of life partners.

The same principle that explains why Jesse and Jennifer were drawn to Jacksonville might also explain why they would be drawn to one another. The choice of a long-term romantic partner is arguably even more important than the life decisions studied by Pelham et al. (Jones, p. 666).

To do the preliminary name study, the researchers looked at joint bank account names and telephone listings with both names listed. They found surprisingly large numbers of couples who chose partners with the same first three letters of their own name. The largest by far was Michelle and Michael. (2,754 out of 7,860). (Jones, p. 671).

The seven experimental studies chose college students and performed matching experiments on them. For instance, study 5A and 5b garnered participants who wished to meet others for a platonic relationship. The participants were given personality questionnaires, but a standard "personality study" was given to each college students to evaluate for whether they would like that person with the code number of that imaginary student being the birth date of the person evaluating it. They were not informed of the reason for the code. They were asked "(a) How similar do you think this person is to you? (1 _ not at all similar to 11 _ very similar) and (b) How much do you think this person will like you? (1 _ not at all to 11 _ very much)" and other like preliminary questions to see if subliminal likes were noticed and present (Jones, p. 672).

Students were then asked to remember their "partner's" code number and dismissed.

First, the birthday-association manipulation was modestly associated with anticipated liking, _ _.15, t (107) _ 1.64, p _.10. Second, a multiple regression analysis showed that anticipated liking did predict partner liking, even after controlling for birthday association, _ _.61, t (107) _ 8.23, p _.001. Finally, the same regression analysis showed that the birthday-association effect was eliminated after controlling for anticipated liking, _ _.04, t (107) _.54, p _.05. It appears that the relationship between birthday association and partner liking could be mediated by anticipated liking (Jones, p. 673).

The partner's code number enhanced any anticipated liking, which in turn enhanced partner liking. Jones, et al. concluded that this study provided some initial support for people preferring their own birthday numbers to choose who they planned to be attracted to (Jones. p. 674).

The authors concluded that people's feelings, judgments and behaviors are influenced very much by unconscious processes (as Banaji & Greenwald found in 1995, Bargh, Chen and Burroughs found in 1996, and Bargh and Furguson found in 2000) in laboratory experiments. Even though these suggestions appear to influence human behavior in lab experiments, this study by Jones and his associates brings forth substantial evidence that people choose not only where they live and what they eat, but who their life-long partner will be, based on implicit social cognition influences. Implicit egotism is a valid and replicable phenomenon that influences behavior the same way it influences an evaluation of another person based on a semantic differential (Jones, p. 674).

Lasting Love

Commitment is actively caring for another and accepting the other as they are. This type of love is a decision. One decides to accept the other with eyes open, without reservation. The other's faults are both seen and accepted. No matter what the other does, it is approved of by the partner. Often this type of love is achieved only with small children or pets. But a loving father who is absent creates a child who does not feel his love and cannot have a relationship with him. The father's lack of action is not conducive to a growing and long-lasting relationship. Therefore, not only commitment, but active involvement with the one that one loves, is essential to the growing relationship; and absence typically will be felt as lack of love (White, 1995).

The Biology of Love

Men and women approach a potential mate with basic differences. Evolutionary psychologists are now studying the sum of stratagems we employ, and the wisdom of nature in crafting them without our explicit awareness in order to effect a long-lasting relationship Mating intelligence is the subject of a study by Glenn Geher, a professor of psychology at SUNY at New Paltz. He and his associates have developed a mathematical model to demonstrate that women who are skeptical of a man's intentions are almost always better off than women who are too eager to find love. ("He gave me his home number, he asked about my family, he mentioned a concert this spring -- he must be into me!") (Perina, p. 2)

Since women cannot guess a man's intention, they are actually better off being biased. "Women using a 'men are always pigs' decision-making rule may be more likely to actually end up with honest, committed, and long-term-seeking males," says Geher (Geher, p. 255) Women (and men) seem to have a special sense of the opposite-sex's interest and intentions. Darwinian, rather than Aristotelian, the logic used for the survival of the human gene is at stake. Both men and women have mating goals: For men, it is a chance to have sex. For women it is to find a man who does not want to simply have sex and move on.

Study by Haselton and Buss

Martie Haselton of UCLA and David Buss of the University of Texas, Austin, empirically demonstrated the existence of error-management strategies in men and women, which he calls the Error Management Theory (EMT). Haselton says that a biased decision-making pathway to a smoke alarm can make one of two errors. It can sound an alarm in the absence of fire, which is a false positive: annoying, but not lethal. Or it can fail to signal during a real fire, creating a false negative "Engineers can't minimize both errors, because there's a trade-off," says Haselton. "If you lower the threshold for noting fires, you're going to have more false alarms. Natural selection created decision-making adaptations not to maximize accuracy but to minimize the more costly error"

Psychological mechanisms are designed to be predictably biased when the costs of false-positive and false-negative errors were asymmetrical over evolutionary history. This theory explains known phenomena such as men's overperception of women's sexual intent, and it predicts new biases in social inference such as women's underestimation of men's commitment. In Study 1 (N = 217), the authors documented the commitment underperception effect predicted by EMT Haselton, p. 81).

Biased mechanisms in deciding what a potential mate's intention is, is standard operating procedure, according to Haselton. It is a design feature of the human brain as it seeks its goal. Making these judgment calls is part of the procedure. Errors in judgment are not made just in mating mode. They are present all types of relationships, in our everyday perceptions, being put there to protect our egos. One thinks the beautiful and charming have powers they don't possess, one overestimates one's own abilities, and thinks unimportant skills that one does not have. People are sensitive to threats or imagined threats made to their status, to their children, to any domain in which one has invested highly. Women are fiercely protective of their newborns by nature, and threats to one's ego are agonizing if one receives slights made by the boss. Haselton utilized questionnaires and college-aged test subjects to determine that EMT explains men's sexual overperception, predicts a mind-reading error made by Women and a case in which men's sexual overperception is corrected. Reasoning mechanisms are not designed to be maximally correct and EMT may be present in domains "such as inferences about infidelity and aggressive intent." (Haselton, p. 89)

Geher found that smart men are more likely to believe every woman wants them. They have a bias in this regard. And bright women misread men in one key area, they exhibit a markedly conservative bent, assuming men will be distraught over a sexual affair. These women are likely to avoid affairs themselves (or be more covert when they engage in them, in order to create the impression and fact of a long-lasting relationship) (Geher, p. 281).

Men look for sexiness and availability; women look for personality and commitment readiness. Even though these may seem to be errors in judgment, the sexes have overlapping, if not identical, goals: Both want stable relationships in which to raise children. Women want an early commitment to a relationship. When men and women finally commit, biases overlap as well, because they now share important goals. And the most important of these goals is preserving the relationship. Positive illusions keep us marveling at the wonderful mate we have chosen and couples make safe bets on each other's behavior. But even when there is proof positive of one's mate's disagreeableness for one reason or another one chooses to deceive oneself into believing there is no bad there. When it comes to defending a relationship we even lie to ourselves about what is the truth when the need arises (Perina, p. 8).

Biology often views love as a mammalian drive, such as hunger or thirst. But as Robert Winson's book Human outlines, some scientists divide it into: lust, attraction, and attachment, three partly-overlapping stages. Lust exposes members of the opposite sex to each other, romantic attraction encourages them to spend their energy on mating, and attachment involves tolerating the spouse long enough to rear a child through infancy and childhood. Lust is the first and most passionate sexual stage in mating it creates release of increased levels of chemicals such as testosterone and estrogen in the human brain. This affects the brain little more than a few weeks or months. Attraction creates a romantic desire for a specific individual with which to mate, developing out of lust and forming a decision to make a commitment to an individual mate.

Neuroscience indicates that the experience of falling in love is simply the brain consistently releasing dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin (which act similar to amphetamines). These chemicals stimulate the brain's pleasure center and have side-effects: an increased heart rate, loss of appetite and sleep, and an intense feeling of excitement. It is impossible for the brain to constantly undergo this pressure or produce these chemicals indefinitely and this stage may last from one and a half to three years. Since lust and attraction are both temporary stages, a third stage accounts for long-term relationships. Bonding attachment lasts for many years; even decades. Attachments often are strengthened by commitments to marriage and children, or to mutual friendship based on shared interests. Attachment and commitment have been linked to production of higher levels of oxytocin and vasopressin than short-term relationships (Winston, p. 250).

In 2005, Italian scientists at Pavia University found that protein molecules known as the nerve growth factor (NGF) are produced by the body in high levels when first in love, but levels return to normal after one year.

Specifically, four neurotrophin levels, i.e. NGF, BDNF, NT-3, and NT-4, of 58 subjects who had recently fallen in love were compared with levels in a control group who were either single or already engaged in a long-term relationship. The results showed that NGF levels were significantly higher in the subjects in love than as compared to either of the control groups (Emanuele, p. 256).

Dr. Arthur Janov, author of the Biology of Love, points out a developmental fact of people in love. The right hemisphere of the brain, which is larger than the left, is the primary site of feelings, emotions and of holistic, global thinking. Thoughts, plans, and concepts are the domain of the left hemisphere. The right brain becomes mature during the second year of life while the left brain is only beginning to mature. Therefore, feelings pre-date thoughts. Evolution has destined humans to become feeling beings before becoming thinking ones and in the beginning stages of love feelings may determine all of one's actions (Romesin, 1996).

It has been found that humans need love to function normally and sometimes even to survive. Many studies have shown that neglect, or lack of love, has a serious impact on the human ability to survive or develop properly (Romesin, 1996). Dr. Janov noted that neglected infants have brains that are significantly different from the normal brain: the number of stress-hormone receptors, for example, are lower in the brain of neglected infants, which means there is a higher level of stress and unhappiness in that person (Romesin, 1996).

Biology may have successfully determined what goes on in the brain when one is loved by another person. However, there are studies that show some other interesting correlations between the condition of the brain and actually being "in love" or infatuated. Dr. Helen Fisher proposes that there is a dramatic increase in the amount of dopamine and norepinephrine present in the brain when one first becomes infatuated, which would account for the feelings of euphoria and giddiness that one experiences at that point (Fry, 1999). Another study showed that serotonin levels were significantly higher in the brains of those who have just fallen in love, than those in the control group (Schloss, p. 115). Yet another study demonstrates the possibility of a correlation between the ability of adults to bond emotionally with one another when the hormone oxytocin, normally associated with human reproductive processes like lactation and male and female orgasm, is produced (Turner, 1999).

This study found released in the brain during orgasm oxytocin, and dopamine, associated with pain relief and euphoric feelings in general, evidenced by the role it plays (much like the effects of amphetamines and cocaine), as well as serotonin, which brings out feelings of calmness and happiness. "In other words: when we are in love, chemicals associated with pleasure are released into our brains" (Kallich, p. 103).

Continuing Love

While there are millions of books and articles touting the five secrets of long-lasting love, each saying that one must either (1) commit, (2) become emotionally transparent, (3) stop blaming and criticizing, (4) become creative, or (5) become a master of verbal and non-verbal communication, or some variation of these formulas. The truth is that couples who remain together for fifty years may have learned some of these things in keeping their relationship together, but the majority of them have never heard of these "secrets" and simply remain together because it is rewarding, comfortable, special to them in some way and they like their partner. If you ask them, most will say they have feelings of "love" toward their partner, but what kind of love is it after fifty years? Certainly it is not the passionate and obsessive love that originally inflamed them with chemicals that flood the brain during infatuation, because it is impossible for that condition to last more than one year. Determining what goes on as time passes and "love" changes, is the subject of this study.

The author proposes to undertake a study using students and questionnaires, largely as outlined in the three studies above, determining first whether there have been changes noted in the intensity, passion or commitment of the subjects' love toward another, or have noted whether there has been changes in those three categories in the love that has been shown to them by their partner. Then, if there have been changes, what are determining factors in those changes, will be attempted to be understood.

Participants in Study

The participants will be composed of a random population of 500 college student couples within the age group of 20-25, who are U.S. citizens. There will be 50% males and 50% females in the study, of which all of the participants will be volunteering for this experiment.

Materials set of questionnaires will be prepared for each of the couples to complete anonymously, which the responses will be compared with the partner and with other couples. No interviews will be conducted due to lack of funds for such a study.

Procedure

The 500 participants will be randomly chosen from the college database and be informed of their having been chosen via electronic mail. They will be informed of the procedure, and will undergo the study only with their direct consent. Each couple will be individually invited into an empty room with a table and chair, in which they will have approximately an hour to complete the questionnaire. After the survey, they will leave, and the responses will be analyzed in their absence.

Sternberg divides love into three subcategories: Intimacy, Passion and Commitment. For an implicit factor/process/memory (such as schemas and priming) to affect the intensity of love over time, it is theorized that the implicit factor must influence one of the three subcategories (commitment/intimacy/passion), being aware that the intensity of love over time may either increase or decrease (or even remain the same). It is important to this study to determine what implicit factors may contribute to any variation and through research, to discover which of the three subcategories is influenced by this or these implicit factor(s). It may be biological, or mental. It may be a deterioration or strengthening of any of the elements of intimacy, passion or commitment. Change, positive or negative, is certain in life and love. How the changes come about is the subject of this research.