Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Experience and Expression of Love

ISBN-13: 9783030150198 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 249 str.

Victor Karandashev

Spis treści

1.     Cross-cultural comparison of love concepts and their cultural connotations

Several types of love are to be distinguished for adequate cross-cultural comparison of love. Passion is a salient feature of romantic love, but not the only one. Romantic love engages strong affection and preoccupation with love, idealistic attitude toward a partner and relationship.  Is romantic love universal across cultures? Some scholars once believed that romantic love is a Western concept that was not indigenously present in other cultures and was brought by Western civilizations. However, the research findings of recent decades convinced that romantic love - at least passionate love - is a universal phenomenon with its various occurrences in many cultures. Cross-culturally, conceptions of passionate love appear to be surprisingly similar, yet with evident culturally specific definitions of romantic love. Culture is what transforms passionate love into romantic love. Cultural values and traditional behaviors influence the expressions and experiences of love and transfer passionate love as primarily based on a sexual attraction into romantic love as idealized and culturally affected way of loving. Theoretical background and interdisciplinary approach to the concept of romantic love will be set up in this chapter.

2.     Evolutional or cultural?

This chapter compares an evolutional approach to study of love with a cultural one. Evolutionary psychologists contend that passionate love is innate in human nature and is based on biological processes that are universal, applying to people of all cultures. Neuroscience provides strong evidence of this. Does culture still matter? Biology and culture interact generating a complex nature of love. Passion is universal and based on biological principles of sexual selection, while romance is culturally specific and based on historical and cultural traditions.

3.     Love experiences and love expressions: Cross-cultural comparison

Multiple studies convince that love is a universal human emotion that can be experienced and expressed in multiple cultural forms. The world’s cultures differ in several cross-culturally related concepts: collectivism or individualism, independence or interdependence, modernism or traditionalism, urbanism or ruralism, affluence or poverty. The studies show that these factors affect the cultural differences in experience and expression of romantic love. What about expressions of love?  Does a passionate and energetic Latin lover love more intensely than a quiet and reserved Nordic lover? Or do they just express their emotions differently? American culture, for example, stresses the importance of verbal expression of love to another. However, straight expression of love is not always necessary because some things can be implicitly interpreted and understood without words. In Filipino families, for example, the verbal expression of love is much more reserved for special occasions. They do not find it essential to express love in overt ways because it can be construed as excessive and showy. The chapter will present a variety of research findings supporting the diverse expressions of love.

4.     Cultural factors affecting romantic attraction, development, maintenance, and dissolution of love

This chapter will review cultural factors influencing interpersonal attraction (including personality, context, and values) and cultural mediators of attraction, development, maintenance, and dissolution of a romantic relationship (including issues of intimacy, fidelity/infidelity, poaching, and jealousy). How culture affects relations between love, sex, and marriage? Romantic love is the form of love that is most salient in public view. It has different subcategories; some of them are related to sexual love. Sexuality alone is not a love; however it can become one of the ways that love is experienced and expressed in a relationship. So, the chapter will review the relations between romantic love and sex from cross-cultural perspective.  The chapter will also present scholarly findings about cultural understanding of suitability of love for a happy marriage from different cultures and the changes in the attitude to love and marriage across the globe.

5.     Reviewing past and looking forward: From cross-cultural views to intercultural perspectives in romantic love

The chapter will conclude and summarize cross-cultural perspectives and research findings on love presented in previous chapters. It will also set up the stage for the future studies of intercultural romantic relationships.

O autorze

Dr. Victor Karandashev is Professor of Psychology at Aquinas College, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is a scholar with extensive international and cross-cultural experience and interests and has conducted research on international psychology in several European countries, including universities in Norway, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. He was a visiting professor and a Fulbright Scholar in the U.S.A, and has presented his work related to international and cross-cultural psychology at many conferences. He co-edited three volumes of Teaching Psychology around the World (2007, 2009, 2012). His major area of research interest is the study of love, a topic about which he has published several articles, chapters, and monographs. His recent book Romantic Love in Cultural Contexts (2017) is among the most distinguished interdisciplinary contributions to the field.

Blurb

This ambitious volume integrates findings from various disciplines in a comprehensive description of the modern research on love and provides a systematic review of love experience and expression from cross-cultural perspective. It explores numerous interdisciplinary topics, bringing together research in biological and social sciences to explore love, probing the cross-cultural similarities and differences in the feelings, thoughts, and expressions of love. The book’s scope, which includes a review of major theories and key research instruments, provides a comprehensive background for any reader interested in developing an enlightened understanding of the cultural diversity in the concepts, experience, and expression of love.

Included among the chapters:

• How do people in different cultures conceptualize love?
  
• How similar and different are the experiences and expressions of love across cultures?
  
• What are the cultural factors affecting the experience and expression of love?
  
• Cross-cultural understanding of love as passion, joy, commitment, union, respect, submission, intimacy, dependency, and more.
  
• A review of the past and looking into the future of cross-cultural love research.
  

Critical reading for our global age, Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Experience and Expression of Love promotes a thorough understanding of cross-cultural similarities and differences in love, and in so doing is valuable not only for love scholars, emotion researchers, and social psychologists, but also for practitioners and clinicians working with multicultural couples and families.