Attraction and Intimacy: Liking and Loving Others

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Attraction and Intimacy Liking and Loving Others

• Chapter 11

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Outline of Todays Lecture

• Bonding Forming Relationships
• Love
• Maintaining Close Relationships
• Ending Relationships

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Bonding Forming Relationships

• Need to Belong
• A motivation to bond with others in relationships
  that provide ongoing, positive interactions

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Bonding Forming Relationships

• Proximity
• Geographical nearness this strongly predicts
  liking

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Bonding Forming Relationships

• Anticipatory Liking
• People like others they expect to meet more than
  people they do not expect to meet

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Bonding Forming Relationships

• Mere Exposure Effect
• The tendency for novel stimuli to be liked more
  or rated more positively after the rater has been
  repeatedly exposed to them

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Physical Attractiveness

• Attractiveness and mate selection
• Men are attracted to women with youthful physical
  features
• Women are attracted to men who look like they
  will be good providers (i.e., wealthy, powerful
  and ambitious men)

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Physical Attractiveness

• Attractiveness and mate selection
• Men feel most jealous over their mate having sex
  with someone else.
• Women feel more jealous over their mate becoming
  emotionally attached to someone else.

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Physical Attractiveness

• Attractiveness and mate selection
• Men tend to marry younger women.
• Women prefer to marry men just slightly older
  than themselves.

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Physical Attractiveness

• Attractiveness and dating
• Physical attractiveness matters to dating partners

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The Matching Phenomenon

• The tendency for men and women to choose as
  partners those who are a good match in
  attractiveness and other traits.

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Classroom Demonstration

• Why does the matching phenomenon occur?
• Card game goal is to pair up with someone with
  the highest value as you can

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The Physical Attractiveness Stereotype

• The presumption that physically attractive people
  possess other socially desirable traits as well
  What is beautiful is good.

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Contrast Effect

• Men who were exposed to extremely attractive
  women rated an average woman as less attractive
  than men who were not exposed to extremely
  attractive women

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Attractiveness of People we Love

• We perceive people that we like as more
  attractive over time

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Similarity and Complementarity

• Similarity predicts liking
• The greater the similarity between husband and
  wife the happier they are and less likely they
  are to divorce

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Liking People who Like Us

• Researchers have found that discovering that
  someone likes us causes us to like them more
• This is particularly true of people who change
  their mind and end up liking us

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Classroom Exercise

• Fill out Romantic Theories Questionnaire
• When you are finished, reverse code the following
  items 2, 3, 5, 9, 10
• To reverse code
• 1 7, 2 6, 3 5, 4 4, 5 3, 6 2, 7 1
• Add up all of your responses.

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The Ingredients of Love

• Sternbergs Triangular theory of love
• Passion
• Euphoria and sexual excitement.
• Intimacy
• Being free to talk about things, feeling close to
  and understood by loved ones.
• Commitment
• Needing to be with the other person being loyal.
• Ideal love involves all three.

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Intimacy (Liking)
Companionate Love (Intimacy Commitment)
Romantic Love (Intimacy Passion)
Passion (Infatuation)
Commitment (Empty Love)
Fatuous Love (Passion Commitment)
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Misattribution of Arousal

• People sometime misattribute feelings of arousal
  to romantic interest
• Capilano Bridge study

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Gender, Culture, and Love

• Males and females respond similarly to
• Love at first sight
• Passionate love
• Unrequited love
• Being the break-up recipient

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Gender, Culture, and Love

• Men and women differ in
• How they express love
• Men-doing women-saying.
• How they define intimacy
• Men-hanging out women-sharing feelings.
• Men and women used to have different goals in
  choices of partners
• Men-more romantic Women-more pragmatic.
• As more women have become economically
  self-sufficient, differences have decreased.

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Maintaining Close Relationships

• Attachment
• Video

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Maintaining Relationships

• Self-disclosure Revealing intimate aspects of
  oneself to others
• Disclosure Reciprocity The tendency for one
  persons intimacy of self-disclosure to match
  that of a conversational partner

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Ending Relationships

• Roughly 40 of marriages in Canada end in divorce

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Ending Relationships

• People usually stay married if they
• Married after age 20
• Both grew up in stable two-parent homes
• Dated for a long time before marriage
• Are well and similarly educated
• Enjoy a stable income from a good job
• Live in a small town or on a farm
• Do not cohabit of become pregnant before marriage
• Are religiously committed
• Are of similar age, faith and education