Is Love Blind? Love, Lust and Perception

Perception AND

Mag.a Jeanna Nikolov-Ramirez Love: A Multidisciplinary Approach OFAI, May 2015

#tendersubject

LOVE, LUST

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Is Love Blind?

OUTLINE •  What is Love? Lust? •  What is Perception?

•  Does love change how we see? •  Halo effect •  Processing •  Time

•  Findings and Further Questions

•  References

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TRIANGULAR THEORY OF LOVE

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WHAT IS LOVE? WHAT IS LUST?

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Love: “wishes to self expand and caring for or identifying with a person, including feelings of infatuation and emotional bonding”

Lust: “wish, need, or drive to seek out sexual objects or to engage in sexual activities, including feelings of sexual desire”

Förster, J., Özelsel, A., & Epstude, K. (2010). How love and lust change people’s perception of relationship partners. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(2), 237-246.

“..in humans, the process whereby sensory stimulation is translated into organized experience. That experience, or percept, is the joint product of the stimulation and of the process itself…

Because the perceptual process is not itself public or directly observable (except to the perceiver himself, whose percepts are given directly in experience), the validity of perceptual theories can be checked only indirectly. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

WHAT IS PERCEPTION?

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DOES LOVE CHANGE HOW WE SEE?

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Three types of context effects: •  Stimulus based context •  Perceiver based context •  Cultural context

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THE HALO EFFECT •  A cognitive bias in which an observer's

overall impression of a person or product influences the observer's feelings and thoughts about that entity's character or properties.

•  Named by psychologist Edward Thorndike in reference to a person being perceived as having a halo.

POSITIVELY BIASED?

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•  Do positive illusions inevitably breed discontent?

•  Or might idealization actually promote happiness?

•  For instance, seeing a partner's faults through the rosy filters provided by one’s ideals might minimize the potential for conflict.

CONSTRUAL LEVEL THEORY

•  Distant events lead to abstract, global and holistic processing

•  More proximal events lead to concrete, detail oriented, local processing

•  Tested with Navon task

•  Love and lust differ with regard to temporal perspective and affect processing styles!

Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2011). Construal level theory. Handbook of theories of social psychology, 118-134.


LOVE AND CREATIVITY Love and lust lead to different ways of perceiving the world:

•  Love inspires musings about long-term outcomes (having kids, growing old together, etc.)

•  Romantic love "usually involves a long-terms goal or desire of staying together with a person ... and thus contains a perspective on the distant future.”

•  Thoughts of sex tends to focus the mind on the here and now


Concepts of love and lust are represented cognitively in our mental system and are associated with specific semantic associations, expectancies, behavioral manifestations and thinking processes.

•  Global letter processing was enhanced after love priming and reduced after lust priming

•  Lust might “blind” people from perceiving the global features while at the same time enhancing processing of local information

•  Love may enhance global processing without reducing local processing

LOVE AND LUST PRIMING


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LOVE IS NOT BLIND, BUT PRESCIENT •  Intimates who idealized one another more

proved to be more prescient than blind.

•  Idealization: •  Relationships persisted, satisfaction

increased, conflicts are averted, doubts abated, and personal insecurities diminished.

•  >> Self-fulfilling prophecy!

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FINDINGS AND FURTHER QUESTIONS

•  Lasting security and confidence appear to depend on intimates seeing the best in one another

•  Love boosts creativity, Lust diminished it

•  Love may enhance global processing without reducing local processing

•  Carry-Over effects?

•  Temporal perception?

•  Is the visual recognition of objects and color discrimination affected by love/lust?

REFERENCES

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•  Droit-Volet, S., & Meck, W. H. (2007). How emotions colour our perception of time. Trends in cognitive sciences, 11(12), 504-513.

•  Förster, J., Özelsel, A., & Epstude, K. (2010). How love and lust change people’s perception of relationship partners. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(2), 237-246.

•  Hatfield, E., & Rapson, R. L. (1996). Love and sex: Cross-cultural perspectives. Allyn & Bacon.

•  Murray, S. L., Holmes, J. G., & Griffin, D. W. (1996). The self-fulfilling nature of positive illusions in romantic relationships: love is not blind, but prescient. Journal of personality and social psychology, 71(6), 1155.

•  Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2011). Construal level theory. Handbook of theories of social psychology, 118-134.

J e a n n a . n i k o l o v @ g m a i l . c o m

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THANK YOU!

Questions?

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Science

Is Love Blind? Love, Lust and Perception