Sternberg Triangular Theory Although the

Sternberg Triangular Theory Although the divorce rate is staying the same and not continually increasing as in past years, the numbers remain upsetting. The divorce rate in the United States had generally been going up throughout the 20th century until reaching a high in the late 1970s. It has slowly decreased since then. Now there are about 20 divorces for every 1,000 women over age 15. This number is down from the 23 divorces per 1,000 women in 1978, but it is still much greater than the 5 per 1,000 during the 1950s.

The number of single mothers who are not getting married is rising as well. Concerned about the country's high divorce rate, clergy, educators, social scientists, politicians, and others are looking for ways to decrease the number of divorces. This is difficult, because love is a very complicated emotion. No two people define love in exactly the same way. How a wife sees love is most likely different from how her husband sees love.

This is because a person's idea of love comes from many factors such as upbringing, culture, religion, gender and all life's experiences. Since husbands and wives have had different life experiences, they will probably see love differently as well. Sometimes, the differences can be very great. This can become a problem if the partners do not understand each other's views.

Psychologist Robert Sternberg started studying aspects of love, since he realized that "much as psychologists have attempted to explain the mysteries of love through scientific laws and theories, it turns out that the best mirrors of the romantic experience may be Wuthering" (2000).

He began his research by asking such questions as: Why do some couples live happily ever after, while others have more problems than Romeo and Juliet? Why do people often seem to make the same romantic mistakes over and over, following the same experiences with different people in different places, as if they had no choice? The fact that there is a much greater chance for people to get divorced in their second marriage than their first shows how this is true: About 60% of second marriages end in divorce.

In his article, "A Triangular theory of Love" published in 1986, Sternberg proposes that love can be thought to consist of three primary components or a "love triangle" with the three components of passion, intimacy and commitment forming the vertices (119). 1) Passion: the drives that lead to romance, physical attraction, sexual consummation, and related phenomena; 2) Intimacy: the feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness in loving relationships; and 3) Commitment: the decision that one loves someone else and.. The commitment to maintain that love. Passion is the motivational aspect of Sternberg's love theory.

It is the power of receiving or being affected by outside influences. In the case of love, it leads to the physiological desire to be united with a loved one. Once the word meant suffering or agony, like a martyr. When passion wanes, as it normally does, both may feel that original meaning. Sternberg believes that passion is quick to develop and quick to level off. When passion ends, or one party to the relationship discards the other, the mental pain begins. Withdrawal symptoms such as depression are common.

It is like an addiction. Intimacy is the emotional component in Sternberg's love triangle that involves the ability to confide each other fears, hopes and dreams. It involves trust. Sternberg's research found that women are better at achieving intimacy and value it more than men, so if women do not get the intimacy they crave in a relationship with a man they establish close friendships with other women. They can say things to another woman they cnnott say to a man.

Part of this, perhaps, comes from the societal perceptions of the role men and women play in the United States. Acceptance for one partner as an equal to the other may impact on this finding over time. Surely, strong interpersonal communication plays an important role in intimacy. A marriage without intimacy even though commitment and passion are still present, is likely to be unsuccessful. Commitment is the cognitive component, which consists of knowing and perception.

It can keep a marriage together way after passion is gone and intimacy is no longer possible. But commitment without one or both of the other elements leads to an empty marriage. Many older persons today despair over the younger generation's eeming unwillingness to make commitments. Perhaps younger people, seeing what has happened with earlier generations, realize that people and relationships change and that making a commitment should go far beyond what matters to them in the short run.

This research by Sternberg suggests what will and will not be important in the long run. Examples: a) as a relationship develops, the willingness to change in response to each other, and the willingness to tolerate each other's imperfections become important. When two people are young and "in love," even visible flaws are submerged while many others may simply be overlooked or unknown. Tolerance, or lack thereof, emerges as a key factor. b) Sharing of values, especially religious values, is important.

Mixed religious marriages and intercultural marriages can cause trouble when there are children. "Love overcomes all," a sentiment that is frequently said by young couples, is tested when difficult decisions about children have to be made. Suddenly, something not considered has become important and stressful to both parties. In such situations, the need for effective communication can be critical.

http://academics.tjhsst.edu/psych/oldPsych/sternberg/triangle.jpg These three components of passion, intimacy and commitment may be combined to characterize eight kinds of love: Nonlove: No passion, intimacy or commitment Liking: Intimacy without passion and commitment Infatuation: Passion without intimacy and commitment Empty love: Commitment without passion or intimacy Romantic love: Passion and intimacy without commitment Companionate love: Intimacy and commitment without passion Fatuous love: Passion and commitment without intimacy Consummate love: Passion, intimacy and commitment (120).

The relative emphasis of each component changes over time as an adult romantic relationship develops. For example, explains Sternberg, arousal from passionate love normally occurs at the beginning of relationships. It then peaks relatively quickly and decreases to a stable level as the couple becomes more familiar with one another. If the relationship ends, an individual is not capable of feeling passion for a period of time as he/she overcomes feelings of loss.

Likewise, intimacy seems to peak slower than passion and then gradually decreases to a relatively low level of intimacy as interpersonal bonding increases. Changes in the situation, however, seem to activate latent intimacy, which can cause the intimacy levels to return or exceed its earlier peak. Another example is where in successful relationships, the level of commitment first rises at a relatively slow pace, then speeds up and gradually levels off. In failing relationships, the level of commitment usually decreases gradually and decreases back to where it started.

Breaking love down to its component parts is helpful, I think, because it's a way for people to see that especially when it comes to ideal love, there are a number of factors that must be sustained. Ideal love isn't impossible to maintain, but it takes work," Dr. Meston, another intimacy researcher said of Sternberg's work in the Pfizer Journal. Sternberg is not alone in his theories to explain how love works or does not work. A number of other researchers have their own approaches, some quite close to Sternberg's.

Keith Davis and his associates have compared and contrasted love and friendship, using a refined rating scale first developed by Kelling in 1979. They designed a model of multiple relationship characteristics to represent love and friendship. Davis and Todd (1982, 1985) grouped items into seven identifiable clusters, or the Relationship Rating Form. Davis and Latty-Mann (1987) altered these to six factors: Viability (trust, respect, acceptance-tolerance), Intimacy (understanding, confiding), Passion (fascination, exclusiveness, sexual intimacy), Care (aiding, supporting), Satisfaction (happiness, feelings of success, reciprocity), and Conflict (conflict-ambivalence).

Hatfield (1987) conducted a lot of research in interpersonal attraction and suggested two kinds of love: passionate (intense, arousing) and companionate. More recently, she has focused on passionate love, using the Passionate Love Scale. She has looked to measure the degree of passionate love across age groups, from small children up, across cultures, and among both men and women. She sees love as consisting of cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects with strong positives, such as arousal, intensity, intimacy, excitement), and negatives, such as emptiness, anxiety, self-doubt).

The links existing between attachment and love has been studied by Shaver and Hazan (1987), who separated three approaches to infant attachment: avoidant (detached, nonresponsive), anxious-ambivalent (anxious, uncertain), and secure (trusting, stable). They then developed three items to measure the three attachment styles in adult love relations.

They found that (a) relative prevalence of the three attachment styles is roughly the same in adulthood as in infancy, (b) the three kinds of adults differ predictably in the way they experience romantic love, and - attachment style is related in theoretically meaningful ways to mental models of self and social relationships and to relationship experiences with parents.

Because research on romantic love has increased markedly in the past few years, undoubtedly stimulated by the widespread interest in close relationships, Hendrick and Hendrick examined five different measurement approaches to love, including those of the researchers noted above (1989). Hendrick and Hendrick state, "These theories appear to have considerable overlap, but they also deal with different phenomena as well.

Modest claims of one theory's superiority over another are beginning to appear, suggesting the fruitfulness of comparison to determine commonalities and differences." To compare the above theories, Hendrick and Hendrick surveyed 424 undergraduate students at a large southwestern university during the fall semester of 1987. After dropouts, the remaining sample consisted of 391 unmarried undergraduate students (189 men, 202 women), and representative of a somewhat affluent, white, middle-class student population. The researchers measured each of the approaches noted above through specially designed scales.

They found an overall problem not particularly with Sternberg's approach, but with current love research in general like his: That is that Scale similarities and differences may be fascinating to scaling researchers, but often are of little consequence to anyone else... Our answer is that if we ever hope to enlarge our understanding of the complex phenomenon called love, we must attempt the clearest possible conceptualizations about love, as well as the clearest possible approaches to assessing those conceptualizations.

To provide either theory or data regarding love is to provide a necessary but not sufficient condition for the generation of knowledge. Both conditions are required. Hendrick and Hendrick's study indicated that although there are both theory and assessment devices in all these approaches, they are not linked tightly enough. Hazen and Shaver proposed that adult tendencies toward love are based on attachment formed in infancy and childhood. The three items developed to describe adult love styles are heavily oriented toward intimacy and trust.

They may capture the "closeness" aspect of relationship love, but they lack the passion and communication themes that also comprise love. Most likely, attachment styles are the foundation of interpersonal relationships, changed and refined by personality and by life experiences. Future research on attachment and love will probably need to use multiple measures to better capture the complexity of adult life. Hatfield, who believes in the consummate importance of passionate love, has developed a solid scale to measure it.

Although the researchers believe she has captured relatively more "manic" elements of passionate love and relatively misses some of the secure ego-based elements, as expressed in Eros, her scale is nevertheless a broad-ranging measure of the important construct of passionate love. Meanwhile, states Hendrick and Hendrick, " Sternberg has developed a theoretical approach using passion, intimacy, and commitment as the ingredients of all types of love, and his theory is well articulated and conceptually compelling.

Although his 'triangular theory' of loving and liking is a knitted, integrative theory that combines aspects of past theories and the mechanisms underlying them, and may serve at least as well as any other framework currently available," the Triangular Theory of Love Scale does not yet appear to be adequate to measure his components independently and thus begin to validate the theory." Davis's Relationship Rating Form is meant to measure more than just love, and has the strength of being applicable to both friendships and romantic relationships.

At the present time, this scale is not a clear measure, and more item development is needed. Finally, Hendrick and Hendrick say about their own study on love: "Our own approach to the measurement of love is not without problems. Although the Love Attitudes Scale performed well psychometrically, it has been criticized for not measuring love at all, but rather some combination of love constructs and nonlove constructs. Such criticism is worth serious consideration." Clearly, they feel that "Love is simply too unruly to be categorized so easily.

It means different things to different people in different relationships at different points in time. Only with patient, open-minded exploration of several of the current approaches to love will we have any possibility of developing the overarching theory of love that still eludes us." Sternberg's triangular theory of love has also been criticized for its methodology and on the grounds that passion, intimacy, and commitment often overlap.

One study, for example, found that the triangular theory classification "is meaningfully related to individuals' similarity judgments" but that data did not provide strong support for the triangular theory (Hassebrauck and Buhl 1996). Not all researchers have had negative findings with Sternberg's triangular, however. Lemieux tested the assumptions in the Triangular Theory of Love about changes in intimacy, passion, and commitment over time. His study examined differences in the three components among 446 romantically involved individuals who were either casually dating, exclusively dating, engaged, or married.

In support of the Triangular Theory, his findings indicated significant and negative correlations between intimacy and relationship length as well as between passion and relationship length. The correlation between commitment and relationship length was significant and positive. One-way analysis of variance of relational stage gave similar results. Intimacy and passion scores were lowest for participants who were casually dating, higher for participants who were engaged, and lower for married participants. Reported commitment scores increased from casually dating participants to the married participants.

Recently, with his categories of love as a foundation, Sternberg has gone on to another aspect of love. That is, how people actually describe the love they feel. In an article in Psychology Today, Sternberg explained that "My research, which incorporates studies performed over the past decade with hundreds of couples in Connecticut, as well as ongoing studies, has shown that people describe love in many ways. This description reveals their love story.

For example, someone who strongly agrees with the statement, "I believe close relationships are like good partnerships," tells a business story; someone who says they end up with partners who scare them -- or that they like intimidating their partner -- enacts a horror story." He finds that people who start having problems with their relationship begin to have different love descriptions or stories. Couples usually start out being physically attracted and having similar interests and values. Eventually, they may feel that something is missing in their relationship.

That something is usually story agreement. A couple whose stories do not match is similar to two characters on a stage acting out two different plays: They may appear all right at first glance, but there is an underlying lack of coordination in the way they interact and communicate. In contrast, sometimes a couple may appear completely at odds from all external viewpoints, but actually get along fine. This is because they may have some differences, but have matching love stories.

Based on interviews that Sternberg conducted with college students in the 1990s, he defined 25 separate stories that people use to describe love. Some of the most popular were the travel story ("I believe that beginning a relationship is like starting a new journey that promises to be both exciting and challenging"), the gardening story ("I believe any relationship that is left unattended will not survive") and the humor story ("I think taking a relationship too seriously can spoil it").

Among the least popular were the horror story ("I find it exciting when I feel my partner is somewhat frightened of me," or "I tend to end up with people who frighten me"), the collectibles story ("I like dating different partners simultaneously; each partner should fit a particular need") and the autocratic government story ("I think it is more efficient if one person takes control of the important decisions in a relationship"). The research showed that not any one story guarantees success.

Yet some stories seem to predict failure more than others: the police ("I believe it is necessary to watch your partner's every move" or "My partner often calls me several times a day to ask what I am doing"), recovery ("I often find myself helping people get their life back in order" or "I need someone to help me recover from my painful past"), science fiction ("I often find myself attracted to individuals who have unusual and strange characteristics") and theater stories ("I think my relationships are like plays" or "I often find myself attracted to partners who play different roles").

Sternberg suggests that if people have been unhappy in relationships, they should be willing to change their story to make it more practical. For example, horror stories may be fantasized during sexual or other activity, rather than actually physically played out. Psychotherapy can help individuals move from unsuccessful stories to more promising ones. He adds: "People complain that they keep ending up with the same kind of bad partner and that they are 'unlucky in love.'" However, luck has nothing to do with it.

They are subconsciously finding a partner to play out their love stories, or pushing their stories on the people they meet... unless they change their stories, they are treating symptoms rather than causes. If they are unhappy with their partner, they should look not at his/her faults, but at how he/she fits into their expectations. Once they have recognized their story, or learned to live a healthy one of their choosing, they can start noticing parts of that story in possible mates.

Love duplicates stories because it is a story itself. The difference is the authors who can write themselves a happy ending. Sternberg explains that to figure out what one wants in a partner, he/she needs to consider all past relationships, and ask oneself what attributes characterized the people to whom the most attraction was felt and what attributes characterized the people in whom interest was lost.

It is also necessary to see what romantic tale one plans on telling -- and whether or not it has the potential to lead to a 'happily ever after' scenario in the first place. It appears that even though numerous academics have studied the concept of love, it remains unmeasurable an unexplainable. As the researchers said above, it is too complicated an emotion to be put into a mathematical equation or defined in three, six or eight, or even fourteen terms -- "or even in a series of stories.

For now, at least, it seems that people will continue to ask, "What is love all.