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Oct 13, 2021 · love. (n.) Old English lufu "feeling of love; romantic sexual attraction; affection; friendliness; the love of God; Love as an abstraction or personification," from Proto-Germanic *lubo (source also of Old High German liubi "joy," German Liebe "love;" Old Norse, Old Frisian, Dutch lof; German Lob "praise;" Old Saxon liof, Old Frisian liaf ...
- Español (Spanish)
El término del inglés antiguo lufian significa 'sentir amor...
- Deutsch (German)
Altenglisch lufian "Liebe fühlen für, schätzen, Liebe...
- Español (Spanish)
Sep 20, 2022 · What is love? Love is an emotion of strong affection, tenderness, or devotion toward a subject or object. When you love a person you experience pleasurable sensations in their presence and are ...
- Nancy Lovering
- Overview
- Etymology
- Psychological theories of love
- Biological theories of love
love, an emotion characterized by strong feelings of affection for another arising out of kinship, companionship, admiration, or benevolence. In a related sense, “love” designates a benevolent concern for the good or welfare of others. The term is also used to refer to sexual attraction or erotic desire toward another. Love as an individual emotion...
The word love is derived from the hypothetical term leubh, a root in Proto-Indo-European (the reconstructed parent of Indo-European languages) meaning care or desire. Leubh eventually developed into Latin libet and Old English lufu, which was both a noun and a verb describing deep affection or being very fond of something.
One prominent psychological theory of love, the triangular theory, was introduced in the 1980s by the American psychologist Robert Sternberg. Sternberg argued that love has three emotional components: intimacy, passion, and decision or commitment. Familiar forms or experiences of love can be understood to consist of a single component, different combinations of two components, or all three components. For example, the love that is characteristic of close friendships or liking consists of intimacy alone; infatuation consists of passion alone; “empty love”—which may exist at an early stage of an arranged marriage or at a later stage of a deteriorating marriage—consists of commitment alone; romantic love consists of intimacy and passion; “companionate” love consists of intimacy and commitment; fatuous love consists of passion and commitment; and consummate, or complete, love consists of a combination of all three components, intimacy, passion, and commitment. Sternberg also held that forms of love consisting of combinations of components tend to last longer than those consisting of single components.
In the 1970s the American social psychologist Zick Rubin developed a conception of love as consisting of attachment, caring, and intimacy and a conception of liking as consisting of closeness, admiration, respect, and warmth. He incorporated these elements into detailed questionnaires of liking and loving whose scalable answers collectively provide a relatively objective measure of the strength and character of liking or loving in a given relationship.
Many biochemists consider love to be a biological process. Positive socializing triggers cognitive and physiological processes that create desirable or beneficial emotional and neurological states. A relationship provides constant triggering of sensory and cognitive systems that prompt the body to seek love and to respond positively to interaction with loved ones and negatively to their absence. Recent biological theories of love, pioneered in evolutionary research by the American anthropologist Helen Fisher, break down love into three biological processes: lust, attraction, and attachment. Lust generally operates through the distribution of the hormones testosterone and estrogen, attraction via the organic compound dopamine and the neurotransmitters norepinephrine and serotonin, and attachment through the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin. For evolutionary biologists, each component of love has an evolutionary basis: lust for encouraging sexual reproduction, attraction for discriminating in favor of healthy mates, and attachment for facilitating familial bonding.
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For additional discussion of love and other emotions from varied scientific perspectives, see emotion.
Apr 8, 2005 · Love. First published Fri Apr 8, 2005; substantive revision Wed Sep 1, 2021. This essay focuses on personal love, or the love of particular persons as such. Part of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to distinguish the various kinds of personal love. For example, the way in which I love my wife is seemingly very different ...
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Feb 14, 2017 · Table 1: Love can be distilled into three categories: lust, attraction, and attachment. Though there are overlaps and subtleties to each, each type is characterized by its own set of hormones. Testosterone and estrogen drive lust; dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin create attraction; and oxytocin and vasopressin mediate attachment.
Philosophy of Love. This article examines the nature of love and some of the ethical and political ramifications. For the philosopher, the question “what is love?” generates a host of issues: love is an abstract noun which means for some it is a word unattached to anything real or sensible, that is all; for others, it is a means by which our being—our self and its world—are irrevocably ...
Another view, held by Spinoza, is that love elevates us up to an expansive love of all nature. For him, an act of love is an ontological event that ruptures existing being and creates new being. However, since love is an ontological event, creation of new being also coincides with different concepts throughout history, since each period brings ...
