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Personality and Individual Differences
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/paid
Psychological well-being and personality traits are associated with
experiencing love in everyday life
Zita Oravecz
a,⁎
, Jessica Dirsmith
b
, Saeideh Heshmati
c
, Joachim Vandekerckhove
d
,
Timothy R. Brick
a
a
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, United States
b
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA 15282, United States
c
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA 91711, United States
d
University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, United States
ARTICLE INFO
Keywords:
Feeling loved
Individual differences
Psychological well-being
Personality
Ecological momentary assessment
ABSTRACT
Everyday life presents many experiences that can make people feel connected to another and leave them feeling
loved. We conducted two ecological momentary assessment studies (N= 52 and N= 160) to examine people's
subjective perceptions of the impact of these experiences by capturing the extent to which they felt loved at
several randomly sampled times during their daily life. Individual differences in loving feelings were char-
acterized by baseline levels, within-person variabilities, and slow and fast time scale indicators of change.
Results showed that there were considerable individual differences in these characteristics and these individual
differences related systematically to both psychological well-being and personality: across two studies, higher
felt love baseline levels were related to greater psychological well-being as well as to higher Extraversion per-
sonality scores, while people scoring high on Neuroticism showed lower baseline levels.
1. Introduction
A friendly chat with a neighbor, a co-worker offering to help out on
a project, and a welcoming smile from a teacher. All of these are small
but potentially profound momentary experiences that can make one
person feel temporarily connected to another, and leave them feeling
loved. It has long been established that humans thrive on social con-
nectedness (see e.g., Baumeister & Leary, 1995), and languish in its
absence. A lack of affiliation with others can lead to a rise in feelings of
loneliness and social isolation, which has been linked to poorer health
behaviors (i.e., smoking, physical inactivity, and poorer sleep) and
problematic health outcomes such as higher blood pressure and poorer
immune functioning (Cacioppo & Hawkley, 2009;Grant, Hamer, &
Steptoe, 2009) as well as increased risk of early mortality (Holt-
Lunstad, Smith, & Layton, 2010). In contrast, when people express
mutual care and concern for one another (in a romantic or non-ro-
mantic context), these daily interpersonal interactions might result in
the experience of momentary increases in feelings of love. We con-
ceptualize love broadly in this paper and assume that it emerges from
positivity resonance (Fredrickson, 2016). According to this framework,
people experience positivity resonance in their daily lives via biobe-
havioral synchrony, shared momentary experiences of positive emo-
tion, and mutual care. Positivity resonance has already been shown to
have an important impact on well-being (Major, Le Nguyen, Lundberg,
& Fredrickson, 2018).
Researchers have long sought out ways to operationally define love
and to ascertain different types of love. In what follows, we review how
love has been studied in scientific research. We argue that while most of
the empirical work has centered on romantic love, non-romantic love
has also been considered in several studies. Moreover, in recent studies,
the importance of an ecologically valid way of studying love has been
brought into focus. Following this new perspective, our research pre-
sented below delves more deeply into everyday life love experiences
that are not limited to romantic love, by analyzing individual differ-
ences in love experiences via ecological momentary assessment (EMA;
Stone & Shiffman, 1994) studies. By frequently assessing the degree to
which people feel loved (i.e., their levels of felt love) in natural settings
and deriving individual differences in key characteristics of these ex-
periences over time, we aim to create a useful tool to capture the effect
of positivity resonances.
Results obtained in the two EMA studies described below indicate
considerable individual differences in daily love experiences (e.g., in
baseline levels and within-person variability). These interindividual
differences appear to relate systematically to psychological well-being.
To further position daily felt love experiences in existing theoretical
frameworks, we examined links to personality traits and gratitude –
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.109620
Received 2 February 2019; Received in revised form 13 September 2019; Accepted 18 September 2019
⁎
Corresponding author at: 232 Health and Human Development Building, University Park, PA 16802, United States.
interindividual differences in daily experiences of felt love were sys-
tematically related to both.
1.1. How to conceptualize love
Discussions of the characteristics of romantic and non-romantic love
date back at least as far as Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics) and Plato
(Symposium), who distinguished philia (broadly, nonromantic love)
from eros (sexual or romantic love). Research in the modern field of
psychology has primarily focused on romantic love, mostly either from
an evolutionary or biological perspective (e.g., Baumeister &
Finkel, 2010) or by considering its social aspects (e.g., Gottman, 1979;
Hendrick & Hendrick, 1986;Lee, 1977,1988). A social psychology
perspective also emerged with Kelley et al. (1983), who focused on
interdependence and attribution in intimate relationships. The resulting
interest in romantic love has continued to dominate the literature.
While empirical research on non-romantic love is scarce, some re-
searchers have construed love sufficiently broadly to include non-ro-
mantic relationships as well. For example, Sternberg (1986) defined
three basic components of love: intimacy, passion, and commitment;
this is a definition broad enough to include non-romantic love re-
lationships such as among family members and between friends. Others
have returned to Plato's approach and sought to identify types of love
(e.g., Berscheid, 2006) or have characterized love based on behavioral
observations of “love acts”(Hazan & Shaver, 1987) or loving acts (Buss,
1988) or through biological assessments of people who are “in love”
(e.g., Young, 2009). In each case, however, the construct remains lar-
gely focused on romantic love, with other types modeled as a means of
contrasting other social relationships with that common focal state.
At its core, however, the construct of love is also recognized in the
literature as an emotion or as a combination of emotion with a sense of
social connectedness. In fact, Izard (1977) noted that love is the com-
bination of the emotion joy with the interest that people feel in con-
nection with others, which again reinforces the idea that love is multi-
faceted and not limited to just romantic love. This broader under-
standing of love, as stemming generally from positive emotion and
social connectedness, and not only from romantic relationships, can be
seen as a synthesis of findings in the relationship and emotion science.
1.2. Studying love in everyday life
Studying love, especially studying romantic relationships, has gen-
erated new challenges: getting people to fall in love while in the la-
boratory is difficult (Aron, Melinat, Aron, Vallone, & Bator, 1997), and
the timing of relationships is intricate—consider for example how short
interactions on dates might merge into more enduring emotions. To
better understand the underlying pathways of such processes, re-
searchers brought their work out of the laboratory to study people as
they lived their day-to-day lives. For example, Gable and Poore (2008)
assessed people's reflections in long-term dating relationships by sig-
naling them several times a day to report their thoughts and feelings
about their partners. Emerging from these roots, researchers have
begun to place emphasis on everyday life experiences of love, while also
emphasizing a conceptualization of love that is not limited to romantic
relationships. Oravecz, Muth, and Vandekerckhove (2016) and
Heshmati et al. (2019) demonstrated that people tend to agree on what
makes them feel loved in everyday life, indicating that people's un-
derstanding of love does extend beyond strictly romantic love. This is in
line with Fredrickson's (2016) description of love as an emotion that
crosses both romantic and interpersonal non-romantic relationship
boundaries.
At present, empirical research focusing on experiences of love in
daily life (and their correlates) remain scarce. To our knowledge, only
Major et al. (2018) adopted Fredrickson's (2016) empirical framework
for modeling love in everyday life settings, using a daily diary study of
love experiences. Their work showed that higher perceived positivity
resonance was correlated with increased flourishing, fewer depression
symptoms, decreased loneliness, and fewer illness symptoms.
The research presented below takes a similar direction but uses the
method of ecological momentary assessment to gather fine-grained data
about everyday-life experiences of positivity resonance. We focus on
each individual's subjective perception of the impact of these experi-
ences by measuring what we call felt love. This measure is intended to
be broad enough to incorporate both romantic and non-romantic ex-
periences love.In this paper, we show that characteristics derived from
frequent self-report ratings of felt love are predictive of people's psy-
chological well-being and exhibit systematic associations with person-
ality characteristics.
1.3. Momentary and individual-specific aspects of daily love experiences
Since loving connections occur in everyday life context, an ecolo-
gically valid way to assess individuals’feelings of love is critical in
planning for meaningful ways to intervene and prevent subjective
feelings of loneliness and social isolation. Ecological momentary as-
sessment is an established research design to assess human emotions as
individuals they go about with their day-to-day lives. EMA and related
methods such as experience sampling (Csikszentmihályi &
Larson, 1987) have been shown to yield improved ecological validity
and reduce the potential for reporting bias in capturing psychological
processes compared to other methods (Shiffman, Stone, & Hufford,
2008).
We conducted two experience sampling studies to gather empirical
evidence on the impacts of loving feelings in everyday life. Over the
course of two weeks, participants reported several times a day about
their experienced level of love by responding to the question: “How
much do you feel loved right now?”From this rich within-person (intra-
individual) data, three important individual-specific characteristics of
daily love experience were derived: person-specific baseline levels,
fluctuations or intra-individual (within-person) variability around the
baseline, and the inertia of love experiences. We also looked for asso-
ciations between inter-individual (between-person) differences in these
intra-individual characteristics and established measures related to
psychological well-being and personality.
We propose that everyday life experiences of love can provide useful
insights into people's psychological well-being (captured by measuring
emotional well-being and flourishing). We hypothesized that people
with higher psychological well-being experience more love in their
everyday lives, with less variability in the degree to which they feel
loved over the course of the day. Having positive social relationships
has been shown to be an integral part of psychological well-being
(Diener & Seligman, 2009;Reis & Gable, 2003;Reis, Collins, &
Berscheid, 2000), and experiencing positive emotions such as love has
been linked to stronger immune systems (Barak, 2006;Pressman &
Cohen, 2005), and higher life expectancies (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010).
We also explored the secondary hypothesis that gratitude is related
to daily love experiences as literature suggests that everyday acts of
gratitude contribute to positive social exchanges
(McCullough, Kimeldorf, & Cohen, 2008) and play an important role in
close relationships (Kubacka, Finkenauer, Rusbult, & Keijsers, 2011),
potentially affecting daily love experiences. Furthermore,
McCullough, Emmons, and Tsang (2002) found that individuals who
habitually report experiencing gratitude engage in prosocial behaviors
more frequently than those who do not.
Finally, correlates of everyday-life love experiences with the Big
Five personality traits were also analyzed. Individual differences in
components of love have been connected to Big Five personality di-
mensions. For example, both Agreeableness and Conscientiousness have
been found to be positively associated with intimacy and commitment
(Ahmetoglu, Swami, & Chamorro-Premuzic, 2010;Engel, Olson, &
Patrick, 2002). Furthermore, Agreeableness along with Conscientious-
ness and Extraversion predicted various relationship aspects such as
Z. Oravecz, et al.
conflicts with peers, number of peer relationships, and falling in love
(Asendorpf & Wilpers, 1998). Additionally, Heshmati et al. (2019)
linked Neuroticism to cultural knowledge about situations in which
people might feel loved, and Openness to optimistically assuming love
when one is in doubt. However, to our knowledge no study has ad-
dressed the connection of daily love experiences and personality traits -
the current work is targeted at filling this gap.
2. Methods
2.1. Study settings
2.1.1. Community sample
The first EMA study (Study 1), focusing on daily emotional and well-
being experiences, was conducted at a northeastern university. The
sample consisted of 52 individuals, and its demographics are displayed
in Table 1. The sample was collected during summer time and mainly
consisted of university staffand international students. Because of the
relatively diverse age range, we refer to this sample as the community
sample. Participants were asked to complete a battery of personality
tests and demographics items during each of two laboratory sessions,
and to complete short web-based surveys via their own smartphones,
six times daily over the four weeks of the study. In the introductory
session, the participants provided informed consent and their respective
phone numbers were registered with the text messaging service Sur-
veySignal (SurveySignal, LLC, 2015). Text messages to complete the
web-surveys were sent to the participants' smartphones six times a day.
Survey timing was determined by dividing participants' self-reported
usual waking hours into six equal-length intervals, and survey prompts
were delivered at a random timing within each time interval, con-
strained so that no two prompts were less than 30 min apart. This
sampling scheme was chosen to reduce expectation biases in reporting
while providing a representative sampling of the individuals' context.
Web-based surveys were designed in and delivered by the Qualtrics
survey system (Qualtrics, Provo, UT, 2017). Over the course of the four
weeks, participants received and responded to up to 168 text-message
prompted web-based surveys. Each survey contained approximately
10–12 questions (including items related to the level of accomplish-
ment, engagement etc.), but only data coming from the felt love in-
tensity question is analyzed here. Compliance was high, with partici-
pants completing an average of 157 (SD = 15) of the surveys.
Participants were paid proportional to their response rate, with a
maximum payment of $200.
2.1.2. Undergraduate sample
In the second study, the sample consisted of 160 undergraduate
students, recruited at the same location; we refer to these participants
as the undergraduate sample (see demographics in Table 1). They were
enrolled in an eight-week long study examining the effects of mobile
interventions on well-being, results of which are not discussed here.
The intervention was delivered at the beginning of week three, and the
data examined in the present study comprise only the first two weeks
before any intervention occurred. With these first two weeks of data
collection, we aimed to run a replication of Study 1. Self-report surveys
were delivered six times daily following the same protocol as Study 1,
and participants also completed a battery of personality assessments
and provided demographic information during biweekly lab sessions.
Compliance was high in these first two weeks of the study, with par-
ticipants completing an average of 75 (SD = 6) of the 84 surveys.
Participants were proportionally compensated, contingent on response
rate, with a maximum payment of $65 for this portion of the study. The
complete eight-week long study was registered on the Open Science
Framework (OSF) website
1
. All participant interactions for both studies
were overseen by the University's Institutional Review Board.
2.2. Materials
Materials used in the analyses, namely the ecological momentary
assessment of felt love item and the battery of personality assessments,
were consistent across the two studies and the exact forms are available
via the above referenced OSF link (see Undergraduate Sample section).
Data coming from the ecological momentary assessment of felt love are
analyzed in detail later, therefore summary statistics are not provided
here. For the rest of the indicators, means, standard deviations and
reliability measures (Cronbach's alpha; Cronbach, 1951) are reported
below.
2.2.1. Ecological momentary assessment of felt love
The primary modeled outcomes are participant ratings regarding
the degree to which they felt loved at a given moment, as measured by
the question “How much do you feel loved right now?”. Participants
responded using a visual digital sliding scale, with the two extremes
labeled as “Not at all”and “Extremely.”Location on the visual slider
was mapped to integers between 0 and 100 respectively.
2.2.2. Flourishing
One measure used to capture psychological well-being was the
Flourishing Scale (Diener et al., 2010). This brief, eight-item scale
measures an individual's perception of success in several domains, in-
cluding relationships, self-esteem, purpose, and optimism. The final
flourishing score ranges between 1 and 7, with higher values indicating
better psychological well-being (Study1: M= 5.68, SD = 1.11,
alpha = 0.93; Study2: M= 5.86, SD = 0.75, alpha = 0.88).
2.2.3. Emotional well-being
The other measure used to capture psychological well-being was the
emotional well-being subscale of the 36-Item Short Form Health Survey
(SF-36; Ware & Sherourne, 1992). The emotional well-being sub-scale
ranged from 0 to 100, with higher values indicating better well-being
(Study1: M= 71.79, SD = 18.59, alpha = 0.83; Study 2: M= 70.05,
SD = 17.44, alpha = 0.80).
2.2.4. Gratitude
Trait-level gratitude was assessed using the Gratitude Questionnaire
(McCullough et al., 2002). This six-item self-report questionnaire is
designed to assess individual differences in the disposition for experi-
encing gratitude in daily life, scores ranging between 1 and 7 (Study1:
M= 3.04, SD = 1.23, alpha = 0.73; Study2: M= 6.15, SD = 0.79,
alpha = 0.84).
Table 1
Demographic characteristics of the two samples.
Demographics Community sample Undergraduate sample
Gender
% Male 33 32
% Female 67 68
Race
% White 80 78
% Asian 10 10
% Black 4 6
% Hispanic 6 4
% Other 0 1
Age
% Minors (< 18) 0 0
% Young adults (18 –22) 21 100
% Adults (23 –65) 79 0
% Seniors (> 65) 0 0
1
https://osf.io/rxd2p/?view_only=552dfa691bfa40e2a34b961f3e0ad098.
Z. Oravecz, et al.
2.2.5. Personality
Personality was captured via the Big Five model of personality,
using the Big Five Inventory–2 (BFI-2) scale (Soto & John, 2017). The
BFI-2 assesses personality in terms of five domains (scores range be-
tween 1 and 5): extraversion (Study1: M= 3.43, SD = 0.62,
alpha = 0.83; Study2: M= 3.69, SD = 0.74, alpha = 0.87), agree-
ableness (Study1: M= 3.91, SD = 0.61, alpha = 0.85; Study2:
M= 3.84, SD = 0.56, alpha = 0.78), conscientiousness (Study1:
M= 4.03, SD= 0.59, alpha = 0.84; Study2: M= 3.70, SD = 0.66,
alpha = 0.85), negative emotionality (Study1: M= 2.72, SD = 0.84,
alpha = 0.90; Study2: M= 2.65, SD = 0.89, alpha = 0.91), and open-
mindedness (Study1: M= 3.84, SD = 0.66, alpha = 0.85; Study2:
M= 3.78, SD = 0.67, alpha = 0.84).
2.3. Data analysis
We illustrate the modeling framework for capturing individual dif-
ferences in the self-reports of how loved people feel by considering four
weeks of data from four participants in Study 1, as shown in Fig. 1.
Ratings are conveyed on a 0–100 scale, with endpoints ranging from
Not at all to Extremely. Individual differences are visually apparent, and
we propose four substantively motivated characteristics to describe
them. First, Participant 1 (top left) differs from Participant 2 (top right)
because the majority of the self-reports is centered on different areas of
the graph. More specifically, on average, Participant 1′s felt love level is
in the middle between the Not at all and Extremely endpoints, fluctu-
ating around score 54, while Participant 2′s indicates more intense love
experiences, fluctuating around score 86. These are differences in the
baseline levels. A second important characteristic is the degree of fluc-
tuation of self-reported levels of felt love. This characteristic is often
referred to as intra-individual (or within-person) variability and quantified
as a variance or standard deviation parameter; individual differences in
this are very pronounced when comparing Participant 1 (top left) and
Participant 3′s data (bottom left). Third, even for a given level of intra-
individual variance, some people return quickly to their baseline levels,
while others linger longer in a given felt love state. This is a difference
in the inertia of love experiences and is noticeable when comparing
Participant 1 (top left) and Participant 4′s (lower right) data. These
differences play out on the hour-to-hour time-scale: we can see that
Participant 1 returns quickly to their baseline, showing a peaked pat-
tern in the data graph, while for Participant 4 the changes in the felt
love levels are slower, showing a smoother pattern. In other words,
Participant 4 lingers longer in a given love state, with love intensities
changing more slowly than for Participant 1. These three characteristics
have been argued to sufficiently describe individual differences in af-
fective experiences in everyday life (Kuppens, Oravecz, & Tuerlinckx,
2010) and have been found to be related to personality type (see, e.g.,
Oravecz, Tuerlinckx, & Vandekerckhove, 2011), affect dynamics in
psychiatric disorders (see, e.g., Westerman et al., 2017) and age-related
differences in affect dynamics (Wood et al., 2017).
While less visible than the above three characteristics, we can also
observe an upward shift in baseline love levels in Participant 2 and 3′s
data over the course of the study. This phenomenon might be due to
reactivity to the experience sampling (e.g., Conner and Reid, 2012;
Barta, Tennen, & Litt, 2012), which suggests that simply asking people
about their daily experiences raises their awareness, which in turn
might influence the measured experience. If this is true in the context of
feeling loved, then the experience sampling design itself may work as
an intervention and elicit change in felt love levels. To account for this
possibility, we also compute and analyze the change in the baseline (or
baseline drift) as an additional person-specific characteristic. We note
that baseline drift and inertia (described in the previous paragraph)
capture two conceptually different phenomena: inertia captures the
hour-to-hour perseveration of events of felt love, while baseline drift
captures the aggregated effects of those events across days. We can
think of inertia as an indicator of fast time-scale change in felt love and
Fig. 1. Self-reported levels of love from 4 participants over the course of Study 1. Participants reported their momentary levels of felt love on a scale from 0 (Not at
all) to 100 (Extremely). Individual differences in terms of baselines, change in baseline, variance around baselines and inertia (see explanation in text) are apparent.
Z. Oravecz, et al.
baseline drift over the course of the study as a slow time-scale indicator.
A multilevel latent stochastic differential equation model (MLSDEM,
based on the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process model; see, e.g.,
Oravecz, Tuerlinckx, & Vandekerckhove, 2016) was used to fit the self-
reported data on felt love. This approach captures the individual dif-
ferences described above, modeling differences in the baseline, intra-
individual variability, inertia, and change in baseline over the course of
the study, and is robust to the intricate characteristics of the data that
stem from the EMA design. Specifically, in order to reduce effects due to
the anticipation of the prompt, our prompts are unequally spaced
throughout the day, and each participant follows a different (rando-
mized) data collection schedule. This violates the assumptions of many
traditional modeling approaches, such as repeated measures analysis of
variance or autoregressive models. Self-reports about experienced felt
love might also be perturbed with measurement error, which needs to
be separated from meaningful within-person variance (intra-individual
variability measure). This can be done by estimating the four described
individual specific characteristics as latent model parameters (dyna-
mical process) and allowing it to be perturbed by error variance
(measurement part). Third, self-reports are naturally nested within
participants, which calls for a multilevel model (Raudenbush &
Bryk, 2002) that jointly analyzes differences at the within and between
person levels. MLSDEM conforms to all these requirements. Given at
least 50 observations per person, MLSDEMs can reliably estimate the
substantively meaningful characteristics of the individual
(Oravecz et al., 2011). Our data meet this criterion; the average number
of responses was 157 (SD = 15) in the community sample and 75
(SD = 6) in the undergraduate sample.
3. Results
The MLSDEM was fitted in the Bayesian framework (Gelman et al.,
2013), which allows for intuitive interpretation of the results by pro-
viding posterior probability distributions on the quantities of interest.
In the Bayesian framework, prior probability distributions on the model
parameters need to be set, which were chosen to be non-informative in
the current analysis. Data analysis was carried out in JAGS
(Plummer, 2003) and R (R Core Team, 2017), with rjags
(Plummer, 2016) to interface R with JAGS. Correlations between the
three person-specific love characteristics and the trait level measures
were calculated in JASP (version 0.7.5; JASP Team, 2016). Code, data
and full results are available on the OSF page
2
for the project.
3.1. Overview of the group-level trends and individual differences in
everyday life experiences of love across the two experience sampling studies
We define four key individual differences characteristics, shown in
Table 2, which summarize the group-level trends in every day felt love.
Point estimates of the corresponding model parameters and their 95%
Credible Intervals (CIs) are displayed. In the Bayesian framework, the
Credible Interval plays a similar role to the Confidence Interval in the
classical framework. By definition, the probability that the true para-
meter falls within the 95% Credible Interval is 95%. We remind the
reader that the scale for love experiences was between 0 and 100.
As seen in Table 2, the mean level of felt love across people is above
the midpoint of the scale in both studies (M= 63.24 and 70.46, cor-
responding 95% CIs exclude the midpoint 50), with the baseline about
7 points higher in the undergraduate sample than in the community
sample. At the same time, there is a considerable span of individual
differences in these baselines, measured by the group-level standard
deviation estimate (M= 15.07 and 15.49), indicating that some people
do have baseline felt love levels that fall below the midpoint in both
studies.
The baseline level of loving feelings can change during the course of
the study. Statistically, this was captured by allowing the baseline to
vary as a linear
3
function of how long a participant has been in the
study; this is a slow time-scale indicator of change in felt love, referred
to as baseline drift. The posterior mean estimate for the group-level
baseline drift was positive and credibly different from 0 (95% Credible
Interval excludes 0) in both samples (Community M= 0.14; Under-
graduate M= 0.16), implying an overall gradual increase in felt love
over the course of the study. This value represents a 3.92-point (28
days*0.14) increase in love baseline during the course of the study for
the community sample, and a 2.24-point increase for the undergraduate
sample (14×0.16 = 2.24); a relatively small effect size in each case.
Individual differences in the baseline changes were remarkable, with a
standard deviation of 0.21 across the community sample and more than
double this value in the college sample (0.51). These results indicate
that the overall linear increase across the study in experienced love was
not apparent for every participant; for example for some participants it
was much larger (maximum was around 0.60 in Study 1, and around
1.47 in Study 2, corresponding to an overall increase of 16.80 and
20.58 points in felt love levels, respectively).
In both samples, participants also showed a considerable amount of
intra-individual variability in their experience of felt love across days.
The intra-individual variability measure captures how much a given
person's felt love intensity fluctuates around the baseline from day to
day and is displayed in Table 2. The group-level intra-individual
variability estimate quantifies how much on average felt love levels
fluctuate within-person: the community sample showed an average
within-person standard deviation of 14.33 points. Considering the
0–100 scale and the 63.24 average baseline, this value indicates that on
average people experienced considerable ups and downs in how much
they felt loved. The average within-person felt love fluctuations is only
slightly smaller for the college-age participants (M
SD
= 11.89). How-
ever, when compared to this group's 70.46 baseline, it was much less
likely for the undergraduates to fall below the midpoint of the scale,
indicative of more intense love experiences overall.
Finally, the inertia for momentary love states was computed to
capture the fast-time-scale changes in felt love. Inertia was assessed by
analyzing how quickly felt-love states return to the baseline after being
moved away (higher values in Table 2 correspond to less inertia).
Looking at the average inertia estimates in Table 2, the community
Table 2
Group level results on love experiences from two community and under-
graduate samples. Regulation is reported on a log-scale.
Characteristic Sample Point
estimate
95% Credible Interval
Average baseline Community 63.24 58.84 67.41
Undergraduate 70.46 68.00 72.93
Individual differences in
baselines (SD)
Community 15.07 12.51 18.26
Undergraduate 15.49 13.87 17.31
Baseline drift per day Community 0.14 0.08 0.21
Undergraduate 0.16 0.07 0.26
Individual differences in
average change in
baseline per day (SD)
Community 0.21 0.15 0.29
Undergraduate 0.51 0.43 0.60
Average intra-individual
variability (SD)
Community 14.33 12.21 17.30
Undergraduate 11.89 11.05 12.86
Individual differences in
intra-individual
variability (SD)
Community 8.22 5.84 12.36
Undergraduate 5.59 4.73 6.67
Average inertia Community 0.71 −0.36 1.82
Undergraduate 1.53 0.80 1.94
Individual differences in
inertia (SD)
Community 2.12 1.40 3.01
Undergraduate 1.97 1.57 2.34
2
https://osf.io/rxd2p/?view_only=552dfa691bfa40e2a34b961f3e0ad098.
3
A more complex model allowing for quadratic curves was also fitted to the
data but no credible quadratic trends were found.
Z. Oravecz, et al.
sample participants, on average, exhibited somewhat more inertia, that
is a slower change in love states than college sample participants
(M= 0.71 and 1.53 respectively), with comparable amounts of in-
dividual differences (M= 2.12 and 1.97). The scale of these estimates is
somewhat difficult to interpret directly: it is measured on a log scale
and its influence plays out over time. One way to capture what these
numbers represent is to think of them as inducing correlation across
time. A participant in the community sample, with comparatively
slower changes in felt love time, would show lingering effects of past
felt love states after half an hour with a correlation of 0.36 (mid-sized
correlation by Cohen's criteria). By contrast, a participant in the college
sample no longer shows those effects a half hour later—the correlation
with their state a half hour before is around 0.01. After 3 h this cor-
relation is negligible (less than 0.01) for both groups, implying that a
participant's current love state is not predictable from more distal past
experiences.
3.2. Do everyday life love experiences systematically relate to psychological
well-being and personality?
We hypothesized that individual differences in daily life experiences
of loving feelings are systematically related to psychological well-being.
To study these associations, correlations (Pearson's r) were calculated
between indicators psychological well-being, such as flourishing and
emotional well-being; and daily felt love experience characteristics,
namely baseline levels, intra-individual variability, and inertia. We also
explored how these felt love characteristics relate to gratitude and
personality characteristics.
We quantified the evidence for these associations using Bayes
Factors (BF; Ly, Verhagen, & Wagenmakers, 2015). The Bayes Factor is
a statistical tool for hypothesis testing in the Bayesian statistical fra-
mework. With the BF, evidence in favor of no correlation (null hy-
pothesis), is quantified relative to evidence in favor of correlation (al-
ternative hypothesis). BF is computed on a continuous scale, expressing
the ratio of evidence between the alternative and the null hypothesis
(or vice versa, by taking the reciprocal). In order to summarize BFs in
terms of discrete categories for interpretation of evidence strength, a
classification scheme was proposed by Jeffreys (1961). According to
this classification, a BF in favor of a given hypothesis
4
whose value is
below 3 shows anecdotal or no evidence for the alternative, BF between
3 and 10 shows moderate evidence, BF between 10 and 30 shows strong
evidence, BF greater than 30 shows very strong evidence and BF greater
than 100 shows extreme evidence.
In both samples, psychological well-being measures and gratitude
had meaningful medium-size correlations with baseline levels of loving
feelings in everyday life (r’s between 0.43 and 0.64), as shown in
Table 3. The corresponding BFs indicated at least strong evidence for
these correlations. Between the two samples, the undergraduate sample
had somewhat larger effect sizes (r-s between 0.5 and 0.6) and stronger
evidence (‘extreme’) in favor of these effects. Intra-individual varia-
bility (IIV) in felt love yielded small negative correlations with psy-
chological well-being measures and gratitude, but the evidence sup-
porting these effects was weak (BFs are all below 3). Inertia showed a
small-size positive correlation with emotional well-being in the com-
munity sample, suggesting that participants with higher in emotional
well-being experienced a slower change in their love states, but the BF
indicated only moderate evidence in favor of this correlation, and this
effect was not replicated in the college sample. There was no evidence
for any other associations with respect to inertia and the well-being
measures.
Table 4 shows associations between felt love characteristics and
personality traits. In both samples, results indicated that more extra-
verted participants tended to have higher baseline levels of everyday-
life felt love experiences (r= 0.35, BF = 4.13 and r= 0.30,
BF = 146.60 in the community and undergraduate samples, respec-
tively). In contrast, participants who scored higher on the neuroticism
scale had lower baselines (r=−0.42, BF = 16.32 and r=−0.33,
BF = 829.52). In the community sample, we also found evidence that
neurotic individuals had more variability around this baseline
(r= 0.42, BF = 18.94). While there was a small positive correlation
suggesting the same tendency in the undergraduate sample, the evi-
dence for this effect was anecdotal. However, in the undergraduate
sample neuroticism was weakly associated with higher inertia
(r= 0.21, BF = 3.34), with moderate evidence for this effect. Finally,
undergraduate participants with Agreeable personalities tended to have
higher baselines (r= 0.35, BF = 2656.39), indicating more intense love
experiences for these participants. Correlations in the same directions
were found in the community sample as well, but they were smaller,
without sufficient evidence to consider them credible.
4. Discussion
The two studies presented here expand upon existing research on
love by assessing how loved individuals felt throughout their day and
examining correlations with other psychological variables including
personality and psychological well-being. In both studies, ecological
momentary assessment via smartphone at random times throughout the
day was able to capture considerable individual differences in felt love
experiences. We used a one item measure of loving feelings, adminis-
tered six times daily for several weeks to make sure we sample a variety
of everyday life experiences. Item conciseness is a useful characteristic
in EMA settings as it avoids unnecessary burden on participants, re-
sulting in better compliance and longer periods of measurement.
Individual differences based on this concise love measure showed sys-
tematic relationships with other well-studied psychological variables,
suggesting that the ecological momentary assessment design is a viable
and useful method of learning about people's everyday life felt love
experiences.
We modeled self-reported levels of felt love in terms of a person-
specific baseline level, intra-individual variability around that baseline,
slow-timescale change in the baseline and fast-timescale inertia. The
results from these models showed a fairly similar picture across the two
studies, one with a broad age range (between 19 and 48) and another
consisting of undergraduate students (between 18 and 22). While most
of the results were consistent, the college-aged sample did exhibit a
slightly higher baseline with less intra-individual variability around it,
Table 3
Results on the associations between psychological well-being and everyday life
love experiences, in terms of Pearson's r correlations and corresponding Bayes
Factors quantifying the ratio of evidence in favor of the correlation. IIV stands
for intra-individual variability.
Predictor Sample Statistic Baseline IIV Inertia
Flourishing Community r0.55 −0.26 0.20
BF 1031.54 0.94 0.45
Undergraduate r0.64 −0.17 −0.06
BF 1.20 ×10
17
0.93 0.13
Gratitude Community r0.53 −0.28 0.31
BF 489.53 1.15 2.04
Undergraduate r0.55 −0.01 −0.02
BF 1.15 ×10
11
0.21 0.10
Emotional Well-
being
Community r0.43 −0.22 0.33
BF 24.89 0.56 3.00
Undergraduate r0.51 −0.19 −0.06
BF 2.26 ×10
9
1.90 1.13
4
BF in favor of the alternative hypothesis is conventionally denoted BF
10
,
although in this paper we denote it simply as BF. This BF (BF
10
) can be con-
verted into BF
01
, which quantifies evidence in favor of the null, by taking the
inverse: BF10 = 1/BF01, with interpretations identical, mutatis mutandis. We
do not refer to BF
01
s anywhere in this paper.
Z. Oravecz, et al.
suggesting more consistently intense love experiences overall in that
age group.
Characteristics of everyday-life felt love, parameterized in terms of
baseline levels, variability, and inertia, showed credible relationships
with indicators of psychological well-being, such as flourishing and
emotional well-being, as well as with gratitude and personality traits.
Psychological well-being measures showed credible medium-sized
correlations with baseline levels of loving feelings in everyday life, with
strong evidence supporting these correlations, and this observation
replicated across the two studies: people who feel loved seemed to feel
happier as well. Similarly, we found evidence that higher trait gratitude
is related to higher daily love experiences, most likely via reciprocal
mechanisms as in close relationships (Kubacka et al., 2011). While
these relationships were evident in both samples, although we found
larger effect sizes and more evidence in favor of the effects in the col-
lege sample.
We also hypothesized that lower levels of intra-individual varia-
bility in felt love would be associated with higher levels of psycholo-
gical well-being. While we did find small negative correlations between
levels of IIV and the psychological well-being measures and gratitude,
suggesting that low variability may have positive effects, the limited
evidence supporting these effects leaves us unable to draw any firm
conclusions about this relationship. We also explored the relationships
between psychological well-being and inertia, without any hypotheses
set on these beforehand. The community sample showed a medium-
sized positive correlation between inertia and emotional well-being,
suggesting that longer-lasting states of felt love are associated with
better emotional well-being; however, the evidence supporting this
barely reached a moderate level and the effect did not replicate in the
undergraduate sample. We conclude that further work is necessary to
better understand the relationship between psychological well-being
and felt love IIV and inertia measures.
Importantly, both of our studies found credible evidence that feeling
loved in daily life is associated with flourishing and emotional well-
being. These findings highlight the importance of studying felt love in
its natural context and emphasize that for psychological well-being, it is
not only romantic relationships that matter, but also other forms of
positivity resonance people experience in their everyday life. While our
design does not permit causal inference, we theorize that these char-
acteristics demonstrate a mutual, cyclical influence upon one another.
If so, nonromantic felt love may provide an avenue for intervention to
improve well-being if applied appropriately. Interestingly, we found
evidence of a small but credible drift in participants’baselines of felt
love over the duration of the study. While small enough to be unlikely
to bias results over the course of a one- to two-month study, the effect
implies that raising awareness of felt love in day-to-day life may itself
be an intervention that raises levels of felt love over a longer period of
time. This suggests there may be merit in developing interventions to
improve well-being that are based in raising momentary awareness of
felt love using smartphone-based platforms.
Finally, we also explored associations between characteristics of
daily-life felt love and personality traits. Across both samples, higher
Extroversion individuals tended to have higher baseline levels of every
day felt love, while individuals with higher levels of Neuroticism de-
monstrated opposite patterns. These consistent findings help us further
highlight the importance of everyday-life felt love construct and can be
used to facilitate the development of individualized intervention stra-
tegies.
5. Limitations and future directions
The study samples consisted of individuals demonstrating relatively
adaptive psychological well-being. Future studies may wish to explore
subgroups of individuals who may be in greater need of assessment of
day-to-day feelings in order to drive future treatment or intervention.
For example, it would be interesting to compare individuals with
mental health symptoms or diagnoses such as anxiety or depression to
the general population in order to determine if there are differences in
their daily experiences felt love. These potential differences could assist
in treatment and intervention to improve the health and well-being of
these subgroups of individuals. Additionally, these studies consisted of
adult participants only; future research may wish to explore the impact
of every day felt love in both younger and older populations. Examining
child and adolescent populations as well as aging adults could yield
meaningful information for both groups.
As mentioned above, one important limitation of the study is that
our design does not permit direct causal inference, and all associations
are correlational. Therefore more research is needed to determine for
example the causal direction and mechanism of the link between per-
sonality and felt love. Although our results show that extroverted,
outgoing people are more likely to report feeling loved than individuals
who are more anxious and neurotic, two possibilities exist. It is possible
that people who demonstrate higher neuroticism or anxiety are less
likely to interpret a given event as an expression of love, an effect that
training may be able to mitigate, and which may have nontrivial im-
pacts on relationship satisfaction and well-being. It seems likely that the
opposite effect may be true for people who exhibit high extraversion,
and indeed they may be incentivized to engage in social interaction
because they are more likely to view interpersonal acts as acts of love.
This heterogeneity across personality scores is underscored by the
large amounts of overall interpersonal variability in individual char-
acteristics that define daily felt love. The differences between age
groups further underscore this variability, suggesting that like the
weightings of feelings in Gable and Poore's (2008) study of relation-
ships, the role and influence of felt love may vary both between in-
dividuals and across the lifespan.
Future research may also wish to explore the impact of gratitude
interventions on felt love. Gratitude, here defined as a virtue or as an
emotional state that involves an interpersonal connection between both
the benefactor and beneficiary (Emmons, 2007), has a close relation-
ship with Fredrickson's (2016) conceptualization of love. Gratitude in-
terventions may increase or improve how much love people feel as they
go about their day-to-day lives. Liao and Weng (2018) found that
gratefulness impacts subjective well-being, mediated by social con-
nectedness and expanding meaning in life. Froh et al. (2009) found that
gratitude interventions were moderated by positive affect, with low-
positive-affect individuals showing more benefit from these
Table 4
Results of the associations between personality traits and everyday life love
experiences, in terms of Pearson's r correlations and corresponding Bayes
Factors quantifying the ratio of evidence in favor of the correlation. IIV stands
for intra-individual variability.
Predictor Sample Statistic Baseline IIV Inertia
Extraversion Community r0.35 −0.23 −0.11
BF 4.13 0.61 0.23
Undergraduate r0.30 −0.07 0.12
BF 146.60 0.15 0.28
Agreeableness Community r0.29 −0.02 0.24
BF 1.32 0.17 0.73
Undergraduate r0.35 −0.18 −0.03
BF 2656.39 0.70 0.11
Conscientiousness Community r0.11 −0.05 0.26
BF 0.23 0.18 0.99
Undergraduate r0.20 −0.11 −0.00
BF 2.49 0.24 0.01
Neuroticism Community r−0.42 0.42 −0.09
BF 16.32 18.94 0.21
Undergraduate r−0.33 0.19 0.21
BF 829.52 1.62 3.34
Openness Community r−0.05 0.17 −0.33
BF 0.19 0.35 2.60
Undergraduate r0.09 0.03 0.05
BF 0.20 0.10 0.12
Z. Oravecz, et al.
interactions. Our findings imply that felt love may provide additional
pathways to both positive affect and overall well-being, and may,
therefore, be a valuable construct in the implementation of gratitude-
based interventions. More work is required to determine what role, if
any, felt love plays in these relationships.
We predict that many individuals will respond to or benefit from a
simple intervention that makes them aware of everyday feelings of love
in their lives. In the current study, higher baseline experience of daily
felt love was linked to higher well-being, indicating that interventions
to increase well-being in adults can be oriented towards increasing
awareness of feelings of love. One example includes Loving Kindness
Meditation (Hutcherson, Seppala, & Gross, 2008), a meditation inter-
vention focused on increasing social connectedness. Interventions
centered on compassion and care through receiving care and expressing
care for others, might also be effective ways to increase felt love and
consequently increasing well-being (Dvořáková, Greenberg, &
Roeser, 2019).
However, the intricate interpersonal differences in our data imply
that some individuals may require additional or different support in
order to achieve and maintain psychological well-being. Interventions
must, therefore, be tailored to their specific needs. We suggest that
additional work on the sources and correlates of between-person
variability in felt love may be beneficial to researchers hoping to deploy
interventions using felt love.
6. Conclusions
We presented results from two experience sampling studies on felt
love in everyday life. Our results suggest that overall levels of felt love
have close relationships with psychological well-being, and may be
predictive of personality traits. These results are generally consistent
across studies, although some effects are stronger or weaker in the
college-student sample than in the broader community sample, sug-
gesting that the role of felt love may vary across the lifespan. We also
found substantial between-person variability in felt love. We suggest
that the construct of felt love may be useful, and recommend additional
research geared towards the development and customization of in-
dividualized felt-love interventions to improve well-being at all stages
of life.
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