first guest lecturer for this Introduction to Psychology

course, Dean Peter Salovey. Peter is an old friend and

colleague. Many of you--I think everybody

here knows of him through his role as Dean of Yale College.

I'll just, in this context of this introduction,

mention two other things about him.

One is prior to being dean and in fact, still as a dean,

he's an active scientist and in particular,

a social psychologist actively involved in studying health

psychology, the proper use of psychological methods to frame

health messages, and also is the founder and

developer of the idea of emotional intelligence,

an idea he's done a huge amount of research on.

Secondly, Peter is or was an active and extremely well-known

teacher at Yale College. He taught at one point,

the largest course ever in Yale College – a course on

Psychology in Law which broke every record ever had here.

And before that, during that,

and after that, he was a legendary Introduction

to Psychology teacher. And I think--and he had some

reason for why he was so legendary with his lecture today

on the topic of love.

[applause] Dean Peter Salovey:

Thanks very much.

Okay. Thank you very much,

Professor Bloom. It really is a pleasure to come

and lecture to you today on Valentine's Day on the topic of

love. My main area of research is

human emotion. And love is an emotion.

It's not one that I study personally, at least not in the

lab, and--but it is fun to talk about.

And it is a topic that lends itself to many social

psychological phenomena. It's also great to be able to

come in and guest lecture. One of the things I very much

miss since serving as dean is the opportunity to teach

Psychology 110. And although I love being dean,

I do miss teaching Introductory Psychology, the feeling of

exposing people to ideas that maybe you hadn't heard before.

Well, I suspect some of the ideas in this talk you'll have

not heard before and for a variety of reasons.

A couple of the things you'll notice is that some of the

experiments I'll talk about today are not the kinds of

experiments that can be done anymore.

They're not considered ethically acceptable but they

were done in the ‘50s and ‘60s and early ‘70s when

ethical standards were different and so we can teach them.

We just can't give you the same experiences that some of the

college students that we'll talk about today in these studies

had. The other thing I will mention

is that there is a certain androcentric and heterosexual

quality to much of the social psychological research on

romantic love. You'll see that in the

experiments. Usually, the participants are

men and usually the targets are women in these experiments.

I'm not endorsing this as the only way to study love.

It just happens to be the way these experiments were done and

so I mention this caution right from the beginning.

We'll have to think about--One of the things you should think

about is do you think these experiments generalized to other

kinds of dyadic relationships. And that's a question that I

think you can ask throughout this lecture.

Okay. So let's get started.

And to start things off I think what we need to do is consider a

definition. I'm going to define what love

is but then most of the experiments I'm going to talk

about are really focused more on attraction than love--who finds

each other of romantic interest that might then develop into a

love relationship. But let's start with a

definition of love. And I'm going to pick a

definition from a former colleague, Robert Sternberg,

who is now the dean at Tufts University but was here on our

faculty at Yale for nearly thirty years or so.

And he has a theory of love that argues that it's made up of

three components: intimacy,

passion, and commitment, or what is sometimes called

decision commitment. And these are relatively

straightforward. He argued that you don't have

love if you don't have all three of these elements.

Intimacy is the feeling of closeness, of connectedness with

someone, of bonding. Operationally,

you could think of intimacy as you share secrets,

you share information with this person that you don't share with

anybody else. Okay.

That's really what intimacy is, the bond that comes from

sharing information that isn't shared with other--with many

other people. Second element is passion.

Passion is what you think it is. Passion is the--we would say

the drive that leads to romance. You can think of it as physical

attraction or sex. And Sternberg argues that this

is a required component of a love relationship.

It is not, however, a required component of taking

a shower in Calhoun College. [laughter]

The third element of love in Sternberg's theory is what he

calls decision or commitment, the decision that one is in a

love relationship, the willingness to label it as

such, and a commitment to maintain

that relationship at least for some period of time.

Sternberg would argue it's not love if you don't call it love

and if you don't have some desire to maintain the

relationship. So if you have all three of

these, intimacy, passion and commitment,

in Sternberg's theory you have love.

Now what's interesting about the theory is what do you have

if you only have one out of three or two out of three?

What do you have and how is it different if you have a

different two out of three? These are--What's interesting

about this kind of theorizing is it give--it gives rise to many

different permutations that when you break them down and start to

look at them carefully can be quite interesting.

So what I've done is I've taken Sternberg's three elements of

love, intimacy, passion and commitment,

and I've listed out the different kinds of relationships

one would have if you had zero, one, two or three out of the

three elements. And I'm using names or types

that Sternberg uses in his theory.

These are really from him. Some of these are pretty

obvious. If you don't have intimacy,

if you don't have passion, if you don't have commitment,

you don't have love. Sternberg calls this non-love.

That's the technical term. And [laughs]

essentially what he's saying is the relationship you now have to

the person sitting next to you, presuming that you're sitting

next to a random person that you didn't know from your college,

is probably non-love. If it's something else,

we could talk about it at the end of the lecture or perhaps

when I get to it in a moment. Now let's start to add elements.

Let's add intimacy. This is sharing secrets,

a feeling of closeness, connectedness,

bonding. Let's say we have that with

someone but we don't have passion, that is,

no sexual arousal, and no commitment to maintain

the relationship. This is liking.

Sternberg calls it liking. And liking is really what is

happening in most typical friendships, not your closest

friendship but friendships of a casual kind.

You feel close, you share certain information

with that person that you don't share with other--many other

people, but you're not physically

attracted and there's no particular commitment to

maintaining this for a long period of time.

Now, what if you're not intimate, you're not committed,

but you're passionate; you feel that sexual arousal.

This is what Sternberg would call infatuation.

And that term probably works for you too, infatuated love,

and this is love at first sight.

"I don't know you, we've never shared any secrets

because I don't know you, I'm not committed to defining

this as anything, I'm not committed to the future.

In fact, I'm not thinking about the future.

I'm thinking about right now but boy, am I attracted."

Right. That's infatuation and that's

what Sternberg means by infatuated love.

The third kind of one-element relationship is there's no

intimacy, right, no bonding,

no closeness, no secrets, no physical

attraction, no sexual arousal, but by gosh,

we are going to maintain this relationship,

we are committed to it for all time.

Sternberg calls that "empty love."

Empty love is kind of interesting.

It's often the final stage of long-term relationships that

have gone bad. "We don't share information

with each other anymore so there's no intimacy.

We don't feel physically attracted to each other anymore,

there's no passion, but we'd better stay together

for the kids, right?

Or we've got to stay together for appearance's sake or we'd

better stay together because financially it would be a

disaster if we don't" or all of the reasons other than intimacy

and passion that people might commit to each other.

That's what Sternberg calls empty love.

Now what's interesting is in societies where marriages are

arranged this is often the first stage of a love relationship.

These two people who have maybe never seen each other before,

who have never shared secrets so there's no intimacy,

who have never--don't know if they're physically attracted to

each other or on their wedding day revealed to each other and

committed legally and sometimes religiously to each other.

Right? The commitment is there but at

that moment nothing else might be there.

What's interesting of course is that such relationships don't

seem to have any greater chance of ending in divorce than people

who marry for love. But there's a big confound,

there's a big problem in studies of those kind of

relationships. What might it be?

Anybody. What might be the problem in

the statement I just made that these kind of relationships are

just as likely to survive as people who marry for love?

Yes. Student:

[inaudible] Dean Peter Salovey:

Yeah. So they may occur;

they're more likely to occur in societies that frown on divorce.

They make it very costly, socially costly,

to divorce, so then they stay together for all kinds of

reasons, not always such good ones.

All right. Now who was it who sang the

song "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad"?

Was that Meat Loaf? Who was it?

It was Meat Loaf. All right.

Professor Bloom says it was Meat Loaf.

It was Meat Loaf. You're all saying,

"there was a singer called Meat Loaf?"

Meat Loaf sang the song "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad."

Let's see if two out of three ain't bad.

What if you have intimacy, "we share secrets,

passion, we feel physically attracted to each other but

we're not making any commitments here."

Sternberg calls that "romantic love."

This is physical attraction with close bonding but no

commitment, Romeo and Juliet when they first met.

This is often the way relationships start:

"We like each other, I'm physically attracted to

each other, I--to you, I enjoy spending

time with you but I'm not making any long-term commitments.

So I'm not even willing to use the ‘L' word in describing

what it is we have." Right?

Many of you might have been in relationships of this sort.

That's romance. That's romantic love.

Now, what if you have intimacy, "we share secrets with each

other, but there's no particular physical attraction but we are

really committed to this relationship."

This is what Sternberg calls "companionate love."

This is your best friend. "We are committed to sharing

intimacy, to being friends forever," but physical

attraction is not part of the equation here.

This is sort of the--maybe the Greek ideal in relationships of

some kind. All right.

What if we have passion, "I'm sexually attracted to

you," but no intimacy. "I don't want to really know

that much about you, I don't want to really share

anything of me with you, but I am committed to