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Is Romantic Love a Linking Emotion?
Abstract
This article aims to provide a contribution to the debate about concepts that describe the empirically rich phenomenon 'romantic love'. The great variety of different facets of romantic love that exist and that we encountered in over 100 qualitative interviews and 4 focus group discussions carried out in Spain (Barcelona) and Germany (Leipzig) have inspired us to rethink existing definitions of romantic love. Rather than emotion or bond, the concept 'linking emotion' might help to capture usually rather unconsidered dimensions of romantic love. In order to discuss the value of defining love as linking emotion, this article will point at the 4 most important dimensions of love that we encountered in the analysis of our interviews. Results of our analysis will be compared with existing definitions of love, the usefulness of different concepts in order to define love will be questioned. Our empirically driven bottom-up approach will allow to discuss the usefulness of defining love as linking emotion.
... For Barbalet (2002:1) 'emotion simply indicates what might be called an experience of involvement… that a person cares about something registers in their physical and dispositional being. It is the experience that is the emotion… ' Seebach and Nùnez-Mosteo (2016) further argue that sharing these experiences creates links between those who feel the emotion and those for, or because of whom, they feel it. These concepts, amongst others, have provided useful frameworks for researchers to reflect upon their emotional experiences whilst conducting social research as part of the reflexive turn and there is now a wealth of literature surrounding this issue. ...
This paper demonstrates how emotional reflexivity can help researchers aspire to the benchmark of objectivity. It will be argued that emotional exchanges during interviews with research participants can enhance understanding based on the author's research experiences in an inter-disciplinary, multi-method, longitudinal study of low-energy, social housing in Aberdeen, Scotland. It will then be demonstrated that emotional reflexivity allowed the researcher to identify how his feelings of empathy with the household occupants, who had had a negative experience, developed and how he began to share their frustrations and disappointments with the Council. This allowed him to locate himself within the research field, and help him understand how this influenced his representation of this group. This consequently allowed him to moderate his focus on the negative experiences of some occupants and produce a more comprehensive account of the full range of the householders' perspectives. In conclusion, it will be argued that emotional reflexivity can help researchers maintain the guiding principle of objectivity whilst locating the researcher within the field and therefore can provide an effective means of negotiating the pitfalls of the reflexive turn.
This article bridges the gap between insights from a theory of racialized organizations and insights from a theory of racialized emotions by asking what role these emotions play in organizations. Drawing on a combined four years of ethnographic data from two predominantly White organizations in the Pacific Northwest – a conservative evangelical mega-church and a progressive public high school – we argue that these two organizations address racial inequality with a set of racialized emotions that we call a “love discourse.” A love discourse is a seemingly apolitical way of addressing inequality that frames the solution to it as a matter of individual feelings of love and kindness rather than as a social problem that requires collective, political, or systemic solutions. A love discourse is grounded in and supports White racial ignorance. By providing a way to avoid politics, a love discourse allows two organizations with different political cultures and value systems to engage in diversity work that seems to address racial inequality, without actually challenging it. Love, in this sense, is a racialized emotion that appears to address racial inequality while also sustaining it.
This paper brings together two of the key theoretical concepts attributed to Georg Simmel – the notion of the ‘stranger’ (the person who is not indigenous to a social context and perpetually seen as possibly not belonging) and ‘love’ as socially constructed which has the potential to turn an individual love into a notion of ‘super individual couplehood’ unifying two individuals and transforming them in the process. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with 35 people in ‘mixed’ couples, this paper examines how loving the stranger is constructed, maintained and challenged across cultures, languages, races, and nationalities.
Pada beberapa penelitian terdahulu, cinta romantis dipandang sebagai tingkatan emosi yang paling spesifik, namun ada pula yang secara neurosains menyatakan bahwa cinta romantis adalah sebuah mekanisme yang terjadi di dalam tubuh manusia. Pada penelitian ini, pandangan cinta romantis yang ingin diketahui adalah cinta romantis menurut kaca mata anak muda. Tujuannya adalah untuk mengetahui bagaimana anak muda berusia 18-25 tahun yang memiliki kebutuhan akan cinta melihat cinta romantis itu sendiri. Penelitian ini melibatkan partisipan sebanyak 147 orang anak muda yang ada di Kota Jakarta (112 partisipan perempuan dan 35 partisipan laki-laki). Analisis dalam penelitian ini didapatkan melalui survei dengan total pernyataan sebanyak 34 butir yang didapatkan dari kutipan cinta romantis, baik dari penelitian sebelumnya (de Munck dkk.., 2011) dan kutipan terkenal mengenai cinta romantis di website. Pernyataan survei dianalisis dengan persentase. Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa consumate love, companionate love, attachment, transcendence, dan limerence menjadi lima dimensi cinta romantis dengan peringkat teratas dalam survei.
In this article I revisit the idea of literary ethnography (proposed by Van de Poel-Knottnerus and Knottnerus, 1994) as a method for investigating social phenomena constituted principally through literature. I report the use of this method to investigate the topic of evidence-based healthcare, EBHC. EBHC is a field of discourse much built upon a dichotomy between rationality and emotionality. In this context literary ethnography, a particular type of discourse analysis, is valuable for allowing researchers to bring the emotional currents of technical-rational discourse into conscious awareness. In such discourses, emotions are not written out by name. The researcher must discern emotional phenomena by experiencing the discourse, and (try to) bring them into intelligible expression. As I clarify this process I develop Van de Poel-Knottnerus and Knottnerus’ method theoretically, look to destabilise the rationalityemotionality dichotomy foundational to discourse around EBHC, and so transgress its conventional lines of thought.
Fundamental in the field of emotions is the question of how many emotion there are or there can be. The answer proposed here is that the number of possible emotions is limites. As long as society differentiates new social situations, labels them, and socializes individuals to experience them, new emotions will continue to emerge. But this view must be qualified by an understanding of the autonomic constraints that limit variability in the experience of emotions. It is argued here that there are four psychologically grounded primary emotions: fear, anger, depression, and satisfaction. They are evolutionarily important, cross-culturally universal, ontogenetically early to emerge, and link empirically with important outcomes of social relations. Secondary emotions, such as guilt, shame, pride, gratitude, love, nostalgia, ennui, and so forth, are acquired through socializing agents who define and label such emotions while the individual is experiencing the autonomic reactions of one of the "primaries." Hence, it is argued here, guilt is a socialized response to arousal of the physiological conditions of fear; shame to those of anger; pride to those of satisfaction; and so on. This integration of primary with secondary emotions incorporates the contributions of both positivist and social constructionist positions in the sociology of emotions.
Love is a topic of considerable import and fascination in virtually every society. In Western cultures, love is claimed as
the grounds for mating and dating and as the basis for family bonding. On a cultural level, love is one of the most frequently
discussed literary topics. It is the repeated focus of philosophers, poets, novelists, musicians, artists, playwrights, and
screen writers; there is no question that love preoccupies us as a society. For at least two decades, social scientists also
have been adding to the burgeoning cornucopia that represents the production of knowledge on love. Research on the topic of
love has expanded at an impressive pace, and there is no slowdown in sight. Yet, as we will see, despite the near-universal
attraction of the subject of love, scholars rarely agree on first principles or stray beyond their disciplinary boundaries.
In this groundbreaking work, Robert Sternberg opens the book of love and shows you how to discover your own story—and how to read your relationships in a whole new light. What draws us so strongly to some people and repels us from others? What makes some relationships work so smoothly and others burst into flames? Sternberg gives us new answers to these questions by showing that the kind of relationship we create depends on the kind of love stories we carry inside us. Drawing on extensive research and fascinating examples of real couples, Sternberg identifies 26 types of love story—including the fantasy story, the business story, the collector story, the horror story, and many others—each with its distinctive advantages and pitfalls, and many of which are clashingly incompatible. These are the largely unconscious preconceptions that guide our romantic choices, and it is only by becoming aware of the kind of story we have about love that we gain the freedom to create more fulfilling and lasting relationships. As long as we remain oblivious to the role our stories play, we are likely to repeat the same mistakes again and again. But the enlivening good news this book brings us is that though our stories drive us, we can revise them and learn to choose partners whose stories are more compatible with our own. Quizzes in each chapter help you to see which stories you identify with most strongly and which apply to your partner. Are you a traveler, a gardener, a teacher, or something else entirely? Love is a Story shows you how to find out.
Against a conceptualization of culture that focuses solely upon the material and immaterial productions that human beings inherit and create in the course of time, be it making a distinction between high culture and popular culture, or using the more all-embracing anthropological approach, Simmel stated that culture could only be viewed and described as a vivid, living process.
To what extent are our most romantic moments determined by the portrayal of love in film and on TV? Is a walk on a moonlit beach a moment of perfect romance or simply a simulation of the familiar ideal seen again and again on billboards and movie screens? In her unique study of American love in the twentieth century, Eva Illouz unravels the mass of images that define our ideas of love and romance, revealing that the experience of 'true' love is deeply embedded in the experience of consumer capitalism. Illouz studies how individual conceptions of love overlap with the world of cliches and images she calls the 'Romantic Utopia'. This utopia lives in the collective imagination of the nation and is built on images that unite amorous and economic activities in the rituals of dating, lovemaking, and marriage. Since the early 1900s, advertisers have tied the purchase of beauty products, sports cars, diet drinks, and snack foods to success in love and happiness. Illouz reveals that, ultimately, every cliche of romance - from an intimate dinner to a dozen red roses - is constructed by advertising and media images that preach a democratic ethos of consumption: material goods and happiness are available to all. Engaging and witty, Illouz's study begins with readings of ads, songs, films, and other public representations of romance and concludes with individual interviews in order to analyze the ways in which mass messages are internalized. Combining extensive historical research, interviews, and postmodern social theory, Illouz brings an impressive scholarship to her fascinating portrait of love in America.
Machine derived contents note: Contents -- Chapter 1: The Rise of Homo Sentimentalis -- Chapter 2: Suffering, Emotional Fields and Emotional Capital -- Chapter 3: Romantic Webs.
"I believe that Luhmann is the only true genius in the social sciences alive today. By this, I mean that not only is he smart, extremely productive, and amazingly erudite, though all this is true enough, but also that he has, in the course of an improbable career, elaborated a theory of the social that completely reinvents sociology and destroys its most cherished dogmas." So wrote Stephen Fuchs in his Contemporary Sociology review of Luhmann's major theoretical work, Social Systems (Stanford, 1995). In this volume, Luhmann analyzes the evolution of love in Western Europe from the seventeenth century to the present.Reviews "Luhmann's unique, monumental, theory-building effort is best described as a consistent attempt to deploy the tools and the inspirations of three strategies: modern information theory, structuralism, and evolutionary theory. . . . Perhaps nothing conveys more poignantly Luhmann's unusual blend of scientific precision with artistic sensibility than his replacement of Parson's 'reciprocity of perspective' with his own 'interpersonal interpenetration.' The first is cool, calculating, cognitive, and dispassionate; the second connotes a richness of relationship that leaves no human faculty unmoved. . . . Luhmann's work is important because, arguably, it comes closer than all other sociological strategies to restoring the lost link between academically reputable social theorizing and the subjective experience of life." —American Journal of Sociology "There is a dearth of analytical writing about the emotions and sentiments that seem to motivate most human action, at least in everyday discussion, although some researchers are making some efforts to remedy this situation. Luhmann's Love as Passion is an outstanding contribution to this emerging trend . . . full of novel information and fascinating ideas." —Contemporary Sociology
Grounded theory methodology and procedure have become one of the most influential modes of carrying out qualitative research when generating theory is a principle aim of the researcher. This volume presents a series of readings that emphasize different aspects of grounded theory methodology and methods. The selections are written by former students of the late Anselm Strauss and have been chosen for their accessibility and range.
This article has three objectives. The first calls on vigorously injecting the notion of emotion in the sociology of consumption. In particular, I show that the former has much to contribute to the latter, especially when consumption is conceived as inherent in the process of identity building and maintaining. In this respect, and this is the second goal of this article, I argue not only that the category of ‘emotion’ can be heuristic for a sociology of consumption, but also that the sociology of consumption has long been, albeit unknowingly, dealing with emotions. Making explicit this analytical category helps strengthen, conceptually, much of the sociology of consumption. The third purpose of this article is to offer preliminary thoughts on the ways in which consumers’ volatile desires and emotions are mediated by culture. For the category of ‘emotion’ not to be psychological or individualistic, we need to understand just how it is infused by cultural meaning through and through. The conceptual link explaining the articulation between emotion and consumption is to be found in the notion of ‘imagination’, understood as the socially situated deployment of cultural fantasies.
Emotion has long been recognized in sociology as crucially important, but most references to it are generalized and vague. In this essay, I nominate shame, specifically, as the premier social emotion. First I review the individualized treatment of shame in psychoanalysis and psychology, and the absence of social context. Then I consider the contributions to the social dimensions of shame by six sociologists (Georg Simmel, Charles Cooley, Norbert Elias, Richard Sennett, Helen Lynd, Erving Goffman) and a psychologist/psychoanalyst (Helen Lewis). I show that Cooley and Lynd, particularly, made contributions to a theory of shame and the social bond. Lewis's idea that shame arises from threats to the bond integrates the contributions of all six sociologists, and points toward future research on emotion, conflict, and alienation/integration.
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