Victor Karandashev - Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Experience and Expression of Love

The scientific efforts to understand love and sex stem from the late nineteenth century and continued in twentieth century. Despite those early attempts, scholars often resisted acknowledging love as a subject of scientific research; only sex and marriage were admitted to the field of science. Nevertheless, throughout recent decades, love and romantic relationships have become popular topics of research in biological and social sciences. Scholars from various disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, and communication studies, have advanced the theory of love and identified major love constructs. Evolutionary and cultural approaches to love have gained its popularity. Love was acknowledged as a universal cross-cultural phenomenon, which manifests its variations in cultural contexts (D. Buss, K. K. Dion and K. L. Dion, H. Fisher, R. Goodwin, W. Jankowiak and E. Fischer, E. Hatfield and R. Rapson, V. Karandashev, D. Landis, R. Levine, C. Simmons, S. Sprecher, and others).

Scholars from several disciplines have explored love from different, yet overlapping, perspectives and complemented each other in their cultural and cross-cultural investigations. Philosophy, literary studies, history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and communication studies each contributed their valuable knowledge and methods. Philosophers contemplated about the nature of love using reasoning and generalizing the facts obtained from researchers in other disciplines (e.g., Naar, 2013; Secomb, 2007; Singer, 1984a, 1984b, 1987; Solomon, 1988; White, 2001). History of emotions informed our cultural understanding of love (e.g., Abbott, 2010; Coontz, 2005; Hunt, 1959; Lee, 2007; Licht, 1972; Manniche, 1987; Murstein, 1974). Literary studies contributed to the love studies exploring peoples minds and dreams in the forms presented in novels, poems, and other writings (e.g., Allen, 1992; Ashton, 2010; Eifring, 2004; Hardin, 2000; Hogan, 2003; Kaler & Johnson-Kurek, 1999; Selinger, 1998; Suzuki, 2010; Zaerr, 2012). Cultural anthropology investigated the norms, traditions, customs, and rituals related to love manifestations in many cultures (e.g., Abu-Lughod, 2000; Danielsson, 1986; De Munck, 1996; Endleman, 1989; Fisher, 1992; Hirsch, & Wardlow, 2006; Jankowiak, ed. 1995, 2008; Lindholm, 2006; Smith, 2001; Trawick, 1990). Sociology and social psychology studied love attitudes and the prevalence of love ideas (e.g., De Rougemont, 1974; Fowler, 2007; Goode, 1959; Illouz, 2012). Psychologists proposed several theories of love and collected multiple empirical findings (e.g., Berscheid, 1985, 2010; Berscheid & Walster, 1969/1978, 1974; Hatfield 1988; Hatfield & Rapson, 1993; Lee, 1976; Liebowitz, 1983; Sternberg, 1998; Tennov, 1979). Neurophysiology, psychophysiology, neuropsychology, and clinical and behavioral research have revealed the role of biology in passionate love (see for review Hatfield and Rapson (2009)). These disciplines employed quantitative and qualitative methods and explored different, yet overlapping, areas of love feelings, processes, mechanisms, manifestations, and prevalence; they complemented each other and brought together a multifaceted picture of what romantic love is. This book aims to review the modern research on love from various disciplines and integrate the cross-cultural findings in a comprehensive review of how people experience and express love.

In recent decades, many scholars of emotions demonstrated their interest in cultural variations and attempted cross-cultural comparisons in their studies of love. Despite the earlier Western ethnocentric bias, which considered romantic love as a European contribution to the world cultures, researchers found evidence of the occurrences of romantic loveor at least passionate lovein many cultures (Fischer, Shaver, & Carnochan, 1990; Fisher, 1992; Gottschall & Nordlund, 2006; Jankowiak & Fischer, 1992; Shaver, Morgan, & Wu, 1996). Besides the question about universality of romantic love, scholars discovered that people from different cultures hold their culturally specific understanding of love. The rich texture and subtle nuances of love need to be understood within a cultural context since culture has a profound impact on peoples definitions of romantic love and on the way they think, feel, and behave in romantic settings (Dion & Dion, 1996; Hatfield, Rapson, & Martel, 2007; Karandashev, 2017; Neto, 2007; Neto et al., 2000). During recent decades, many empirical studies have reported cross-cultural similarities and differences in the concepts of love, in how people experience, express, and communicate their love, how they attract to each other, and how they develop, maintain, and preserve their romantic relationships. These findings are dispersed through journal articles, books, and other publications.