Monthly Archives: May 2023

No Time for Love and Compassion? Really?

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We used to talk about big love and true love, yet we frequently forget that situational, compassionate, and caring love is also love, something like “small love” or a small action of love. This kind of love seems to be omnipotent in our lives, but it isn’t. However, it seems that we have no time for love and compassion.

The compassionate and caring thoughts and actions of small love help the well-being of another person. This kind of small love puts the other person’s well-being first, even in small, everyday situations.

“Small love” even means occasional actions of care and help to our neighbor or another person we encounter in everyday situations. “Small love” also means not being a “bystander” when another person is in need.

There Is No Time for Anything, even for Compassion

With life moving faster than ever, we have a lack of time for many things, sometimes even for love.

Nowadays, a lack of time is one of the biggest problems for our interpersonal connections, friendship, and love. We often experience a “time famine” because we often have too much to do and not enough time to do it.

We can’t connect because we don’t have time or because we think we don’t have time.

We strive to prioritize time when deciding what to do—one task or another. We try to select the value of a job, personal life, and relationships. Another dilemma is whether to accomplish a task well or spend time helping others. Hunger, fatigue, and injury are some of the other factors that influence how compassionate we are willing to be, but time is the most valuable resource today.

This is a particularly difficult problem in medicine: healthcare clinics are so understaffed that employees believe they cannot adequately care for even one patient, let alone all of them.

Compassion for a Patient

Modern medical doctors often complain that they do not have the time to interact compassionately with patients. In one study, 56% said that they lack the time to treat patients with compassion.

It’s important to note that our subjective experience of a “time famine” rather than an objective scarcity of time often motivates this mentality. If you want to establish a fast connection, you need to overcome that perception.

Teaching Medical Doctors “Small Love”

Can we teach physicians how to show compassion even with a shortage of time? A study conducted at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health showed that it is possible.

Here is a script that cancer doctors can use to bookend their patient encounters.

“At the start of the appointment, the oncologists say, “I know this is a tough experience to go through and I want you to know that I am here with you. Some of the things that I say to you today may be difficult to understand, so I want you to feel comfortable stopping me if I say something that is confusing or doesn’t make sense. We are here together, and we will go through this together.”

Then, at the end of the appointment, the doctors said: “I know this is a tough time for you, and I want to emphasize again that we are in this together. I will be with you each step along the way.”

Patients whose doctors shared these words with them perceived their doctors as more friendly, compassionate, and caring. Perhaps more importantly, these patients have significantly lower anxiety levels than patients whose doctors did not say these words.

Does Compassion Matter?

The point of this study was not to show that kindness and compassion matter. It was to show how quickly you can show compassion and care for a patient. The average time it took to read the script was only forty seconds. However, each patient felt a lot less anxious after reading just 99 words.

When “Small Love” Is Compassionate

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Compassionate love is a benevolent emotion that involves giving as a way of loving. The compassionate feelings and actions of small love help another person’s well-being. This form of small love emphasizes the well-being of another person, even in occasional daily situations.

Men and women may exhibit compassionate love or the bystander effect in the daily circumstances they encounter. “Small love” means loving the neighbor or another person we occasionally encounter.

When Are People More Willing to Help in an Occasional Interpersonal Encounter?

Let’s look at the experimental situation that researchers set up to explore this question.

“At 10:00 a.m. on December 14, 1970, a sunny day in Princeton, New Jersey, the first batch of volunteers arrived for a psychology experiment. The participants were seminary students at Princeton Theological, studying religion in preparation for a life of spiritual service.”

When the participants arrived at the study, they were informed that the experiment would look into the career paths of seminarians. Researchers gave each participant reading material to help them prepare a short talk on the topic.

They gave half of the participants a sheet of paper with questions and suggestions for making the most of their seminary education. They gave the other half a copy of the well-known New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan, who stops on the side of the road to assist someone in need.

The volunteers who participated in the experiments were unaware that all of this was just a prelude.

Then, the administrator of the experiment told each volunteer that, because there wasn’t enough room, they would have to walk to another building to give their talk. They gave the participants a map that showed how to get from one building to the next. The route went through an alley. One by one, the people took off. When participants walked into the alley, each of them encountered a startling sight:

“a pile of a man, slumped and motionless in a dark doorway, moaning in distress.”

How Helping Others Could Make You Feel Less Rushed

The Critical Moment of the Experimental Situation to Show Small Love

Here was the critical moment of the experiment: “Who would stop to help, like the Good Samaritan, and who would pass him by?”

“The groaning man, a disguised member of the research team, noted the reactions of each seminarian. Some hurried past without noticing him. Others looked or nodded but didn’t stop. Some paused briefly to ask if the man was all right. And then there were a few “superhelpers” who guided the suffering man inside, refusing to leave until care had arrived.”

How Helping Others Could Make You Feel Less Rushed

Who slowed down? Who was in a hurry? What made a person decide whether or not to help another person in need?

Researchers John Darley and C. Daniel Batson expected that priming the students’ minds to think about the Good Samaritan would make them more likely to help a person in need. The intention was to demonstrate scripture’s power to inspire moral behavior by showing “small love” to a stranger.

What the Results of the Study Revealed

However, the results of the study did not support the expected effect:

“Students who hadn’t read the parable helped (or neglected to help) in similar numbers to those that had. None of the other variables Darley and Batson tested—such as what type of religious beliefs the participants held—made a difference, either.”

How Helping Others Could Make You Feel Less Rushed

The only factor that affected the willingness to help was the time pressure.

“Students who were told to hurry to their destination were significantly less likely to stop to help a man in pain. Students who were told they had a bit of spare time to make the walk stopped more frequently and offered more substantial forms of help.”

Darley, J. M., & Batson, C. D. (1973). ” From Jerusalem to Jericho”: A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior

Surprisingly, seminary students who devote their lives to serving others are less likely to help someone in obvious need if they are short on time.

The feeling that we lack time to help others can be deceptive. And, actually, we can extend our time by connecting with others.

Our Posture Shapes Interpersonal Feelings

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We are wondering how our body posture expresses and affects our feelings towards other people. Many studies show that our body language, facial expressions, and posture say more about how we feel than what we say (Karandashev, 2021).

Both what we say and how we act show how we feel about each other and how much we love them. What we show with our faces and bodies is just as important as what we say. Even if we say, “I love you,” our body language can say something different. Sometimes the way we stand says more about us than what we say. Studies show that our body language, facial expressions, and posture say more about how we feel than what we say.

What a New Study Revealed

Recent research by Patty Van Cappellen at Duke University suggests that others can read our emotions from our body language. It might come as a surprise, but our body posture also conveys our emotions in addition to the way our faces do.

Researchers found that open postures with the arms held high showed positive feelings like warmth and extraversion. When people stood with their arms outstretched, it was a sign of power and anger. This backs up the idea that people use body language to figure out how other people feel.

Our Posture Affects Our Feelings

These findings raise an intriguing question: Do postures only communicate our feelings, or can adopting a specific posture change how we feel?

Van Cappellen and her colleagues conducted another study to find out whether expansive and upward posture facilitates the experience of positive affect.

Participants in the study were asked to adopt one of three poses:

  • hands raised and head lifted;
  • hands folded in front, head looking down; or
  • arms at sides and looking straight ahead.

During the study, participants wore sensors to measure their nervous system and cardiac function. Researchers told them that the experiment was about the physiological and emotional reactions people had to music. They listened to emotionally ambiguous music (by Enya) while holding their pose for two minutes to ensure that they didn’t know that the researchers were interested in posture.

The participants were then asked to describe their feelings after listening to the music, and their feelings were compared to the physiological markers being monitored. The findings demonstrated that participants in a posture with raised arms and heads tilted upward had a more positive overall feeling than participants in other poses.

What the Study Found

“This study shows that assuming particular postures can create or construct an emotion experience. A typical joy posture elicits more positive emotions than other postures.”

as Van Cappellen said.

It’s unclear why this effect is happening. In any case, this research suggests that our body posture aids in expressing our emotions and may also aid us in experiencing certain emotions. This could have a significant effect. It is obviously useful to know how we and others feel in a given situation.

“Emotion expression is what enables social relationships, and we’re showing that you could potentially rewire yourself using different postures. It’s critical that we get more information about what these postures look like and what they express. Otherwise, we can get this wrong.”

as Van Cappellen concluded.

How Body Posture Shows Interpersonal Emotions

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Both our verbal and nonverbal communication express our interpersonal emotions and love. What our facial and bodily expressions say is not less important than what we say. We can say, “I love you,” yet our posture can tell something else. Sometimes our postures show more than what we say. Studies reveal that our facial expression, body movement, and posture show our emotions more than what we say in words.

How Our Bodies and Posture Show Emotions

People frequently tell us that our emotions are “written all over our faces.” That’s because our facial expressions are a primary means of communicating emotions. All these nonverbal expressions show our emotions, whether we are happy by smiling and crinkling our eyes or angry by furrowing our brows and tensing our lips (Karandashev, 2021).

According to recent studies that Patty Van Cappellen conducted at Duke University, our body language can communicate our emotions to others. This may sound surprising, but not only our faces express our emotions, but our body posture does this too.

What the Study of Posture Shows

Van Cappellen and her colleagues investigated the role of body posture in emotional expression in a novel way. They asked a group of people to pose miniature, faceless mannequins in positions that represented four different emotions to them: dominance, joy, hope, and awe.

Some of these emotions are linked to “expansive” postures—where people take up more space by standing erect, opening up their torso, or extending their limbs away from their body. Additionally, the researchers were interested in what ideas people would come up with on their own without assistance from actors or others.

In the study, research assistants were unaware of the experiment’s purpose. The principal investigators asked them to examine photos of the mannequins that participants had created. They assessed their head positions, arm positions, and degrees of expansiveness, measured both horizontally and vertically. The researchers then compared these positions to the alleged feelings they expressed.

Van Cappellen discovered that people interpreted an expansive posture as denoting dominance. This finding was consistent with earlier studies. However, the researchers revealed that even more than dominance, expansive postures represented joy and awe.

As Van Cappellen noted,

“We’re looking at how people express their positive emotions in their full body, and it’s clear that how much space your body takes up is present in other emotions or effective states beyond dominance. We’re finding that positive emotions are also marked by expansiveness—especially joy, which is even more expansive than dominance.”

The Study Revealed that Posture Shows More than We Might Think

Moreover, researchers also observed differences in arm and head positions. For example, arms raised above the head and the head tilted upward represented joyful postures. Awe postures were represented by hands touching the face or hovering near the head. Dominant postures, on the other hand, displayed arms akimbo (hands on hips, elbows out) with the head forward.

This means that emotions are not only communicated in the face but rather fully embodied. The author noted that “the expression and production of emotions is a full-body experience,” and they found signature arm positions for each emotion.

Van Cappellen was also curious as to whether observers of the mannequins would be able to discern the emotions that the various postures represented. The authors used photographs of mannequins that were posed in various ways. The expansiveness remained constant while the arm and head positions varied. Then Van Cappellen asked participants to rate the mannequins based on how well they conveyed a variety of emotional traits, such as extraversion, dominance, energy, warmth, competence, and overall positive and negative feelings.

Participants discovered that expansive postures with arms held high represented positive emotions such as extraversion and warmth. The body position of arms akimbo represented dominance and negative emotion. This supports the notion that people rely on body language to interpret the emotions of others.

As Van Cappellen concludes,

“We’re constantly trying to know what another person is feeling and trying to infer what they’re going to do—and that comes [in part] from their body posture.”

Religious Kindness Leads to More Giving

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Love is one of the most valuable human attitudes and emotions. It is present in all religious teaching across many religions.

Religious Teachings of Love

God encourages people to love and be kind to others. Here are, for example, some examples of Christian teachings on love:

“Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves.”

Romans 12:9-10

Islam teaches people to love each other for the sake of Allah. Allah will ask on the Day of Judgment:

“Where are those who loved each other for the sake of My glory? Today, on a day when there is no shade but Mine, I shall shade them with My shade.”

Abu Hurairah, (Muslim)

Religious Kindness and Love for Others

Do religious people love only others who are of the same faith? Or can they be kind to others of any religion? Do their religious kindness and love cross religious borders?

According to the results of some studies, religious people can be prejudiced, and intergroup bias can decrease prosocial behavior and love for others of different religions.

A recent study, however, has shown that thinking about God encourages prosociality toward religious outgroups. This tendency spreads across cultures.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago investigated

  • whether members of specific religions engage in altruistic behavior that only benefits members of their religion, or
  • whether they are willing to treat members of other religions in the same manner.

It turns out that religious people, regardless of how they practice their faith, are more likely to be kind to others.

As Michael Pasek, an assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, states:

“Religion is often thought to promote intergroup conflict and fuel hostility between people who hold different beliefs. Quite to the contrary — our findings suggest that belief in God, which is an important aspect of most world religions, may sometimes promote more positive intergroup relations.”

The leading author of the study, Michael Pasek, and his team have conducted field and online studies in which more than 4,700 people participated. They were from different cultural and religious backgrounds: Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Middle Eastern, Fijian, and American Jewish people.

Participants had the opportunity to share money with anonymous people of various religions. The participants played multiple rounds of a real-world economic game. They needed to divide a sum of money among themselves and people from different backgrounds. During the first round, participants had to carefully consider their choices. Then, in the later rounds of this economic game, the researchers asked them to think about God before making a decision.

By the way, we should keep in mind that “Americans unsure about God are a fast-growing force in politics.“

Thinking of God Makes People More Generous

Nevertheless, when we think about God, we feel more kind and generous and give more to others.

The results of the study showed that thinking about God has a significant impact on decision-making. In the experimental situation, it resulted in an 11% increase in giving compared to the first rounds of the study.

As Jeremy Ginges, professor of psychology at The New School of Social Research, explains,

“Belief in gods may encourage cooperative norms that help us trade goods and ideas across group boundaries, which is essential to human flourishing. Of course, we are also a parochial species. Our team is now investigating how moral and supernatural beliefs help people balance their parochialism with their need for intergroup cooperation.”

Ginges then adds that there is a trend indicating that religion may prompt people to lend a helping hand more frequently. However, this is not always the case. Some members of a religion may believe that their faith requires them to support their own group more frequently than others.

Anyway, the results of this study demonstrate that religious faith is not responsible for as much intergroup violence, suffering, and distress. Contrary to this, religious faith actually helps strengthen interfaith connections.

People of the “Dark Triad” Tend to Be Manipulative in Relationships

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Many studies have shown what personality traits are attractive for a romantic relationship. However, love studies have paid much less attention to exploring personality traits that negatively affect relationships. According to recent studies, people with Dark Triad traits are more likely to act manipulatively when breaking up with a partner.

What Are the “Dark Triad” Traits?

The concept of the “Dark Triad” includes a set of three groups of personality traits. These are narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. These traits characterize individuals with a lack of sympathy, a deficiency of emotional experience, and a behavioral tendency toward exploitation in a relationship.

How Individuals with the “Dark Triad” Behave in a Relationship

Studies have shown that these personality traits significantly affect how men and women form and maintain friendships and romantic relationships.

A recent study published in the journal “Personality and Individual Differences” investigated how people with “Dark Triad” personality traits behave when breaking up with their partners. The study showed that individuals with the Dark Triad traits behave manipulatively during the breakup of their relationships. According to this research, people with Dark Triad traits are more likely to use manipulation to end a relationship. They tend to be less kind and compassionate when a relationship ends.

The “Dark Triad” and the Breakdown of Relationships

Relationship dissolution is a common and upsetting occurrence in life. This is why the new study by Gayle Brewer and colleagues set out to understand how the “Dark Triad” personality traits of men and women affect relationships.

According to this recent study, individuals who have the “Dark Triad” traits tend to experience lower relationship satisfaction and are more prone to breakdown. They feel less loyalty to a partner and therefore may be more willing to end romantic relationships.

The Two Studies of the “Dark Triad” Showed

In these two studies, researchers examined how partners’ “Dark Triad” personality traits affect the way they end friendships and romantic relationships, exploring break-up strategies.

According to the findings of the first study, individuals with the personality traits of Machiavellianism and psychopathy tend to use manipulation, escalation, and distant communication when they approach the stage of ending a romantic relationship. In contrast to this, individuals with personality traits of narcissism tend to engage in open confrontation. As for the ending of friendship, individuals with high psychopathic traits tend to use distant communication during friendship dissolution.

The findings of the study suggest that people with the “Dark Triad” personality traits tend to use manipulative tactics during the breakup of a romantic relationship. They rarely experience and behave with empathy or kindness during their breakup.

Individuals with both Machiavellianism and psychopathy personality traits often employ aggressive confrontation, cost-escalation, and manipulation.

How to Avoid Date Night Boredom and Passion Decline

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The article describes how a date night, and a romantic relationship can become boring and what partners can do to make them more passionate.

Many love scholars consider passion to be a key feature of romantic love and the beginning of romantic relationships. The boost of passion appears so high that it seems like its intensity will never fade. However, keeping the spark of passionate love alive is challenging.

How to Maintain Passion in a Romantic Relationship

In romantic relationships, passion entails intense feelings of emotional and sexual longing for a partner. In European and European-American cultures, many people believe that they can be happier when their romantic relationships are more passionate. However, the reality of relationships shows that passion, which is usually high when a romantic relationship starts, tends to fade over time as the relationship evolves (Karandashev, 2019; 2022).

You can certainly foster passion in long-term relationships by participating in exciting activities with a partner, such as travel, hiking, or date nights. People can gain new perceptions of a relationship and themselves through these kinds of activities, especially when they are distinctively special.

For instance, you might discover that you enjoy camping, hear various political viewpoints, or encounter various cultural practices and cuisines. Being engaged in these events may lead to greater sexual arousal, passion, and relationship satisfaction. This psychological phenomenon refers to the “excitation transfer.”

The excitation-transfer effect explains the secret of falling in love instantly. It also explains how sexual arousal transfers to other emotions.

The advantages of participating in an exciting activity with a partner are evident. However, many have difficulties doing so. For example, some people may not be very good at setting up exciting dates with their romantic partners. Others may experience difficulties or be stressed by something else. They might be ill. They may have a hard time finding childcare, or they may be strapped for cash.

What Is the Boredom of Date Night and a Relationship?

Another problem is that one of the partners or both can become bored in a relationship rut, also known as boredom.

Boredom is a dissatisfying emotional state that can affect all aspects of a person’s life, including their relationships. At its most extreme, relationship boredom is apathy associated with feeling trapped and not wanting to be around the partner.

Typically, a person feeling bored in a relationship can feel like they have lost something once positive. You may feel as though the spark, fun, and laughter have disappeared. ‘Spice things up’ is a common piece of advice given to individuals who feel stuck in a rut. However, does it work?

Boredom Affects the Frequency and Quality of Date Nights

The feeling of boredom makes it more difficult to add excitement to the relationship. To investigate the problem, Cheryl Harasymchuk, a professor of psychology at Carleton University in Canada, studied how people maintain happy relationships.

In a recent study, the authors tracked the relationships of couples who were already in committed relationships. Researchers monitored their experiences on a daily basis over three weeks, followed by a three-month follow-up.

The authors revealed that on days when partners were more bored in their relationship than usual, they had a lower occurrence of exciting, shared activities (such as date nights).

Furthermore, when men or women who were more bored than usual went on dates, they had dates of lower quality and experienced lower feelings of enjoyment, passion, closeness, and satisfaction. The authors also discovered that men or women who were bored at the start of the study had fewer exciting dates and less relationship passion three months later. Thus, oddly, just when couples need it the most, bored partners are less likely to engage in date nights. Even if they do, the quality of their dates may be lower.

How to Avoid a Boring Date Night and the Decline of Passion

What can couples do, then, to rekindle their passion and break out of a rut?

First of all, you should remember that not every type of date night will be ideal for you. A couple may attend a play as an idea for an exciting date. While it can become another couple’s disappointment. This does not mean that you must go “bungee jumping.”

Talk with your partners about what will fit the level of excitement in your relationship. What fascinates you two? Attempt a novel, exotic restaurant? Or testing your teamwork to see if you can survive a terrifying haunted house? Even discussing potential outcomes can occasionally be exciting.

Partners may also try a variety of activities before settling on one that appeals to both of them in their relationship. For instance, both a man and a woman may not enjoy dancing or rock climbing, but they might enjoy taking a cooking class together.

Partners’ expectations are also important. They may need to adjust their beliefs in order to avoid unrealistic goals, such as recreating the intense feelings from the beginning of the relationship. Instead, partners should concentrate on being present in the moment and being thankful for the time spent with their loved ones.

Finally, there are numerous spices in the “spice things up” cabinet. If you can’t find the right ingredient for your love and relationship, ask around or look it up on the internet.

Lastly, doing fun things together is just one way to make a relationship more passionate. Spending time apart doing hobbies can give couples new things to talk about and give the relationship new energy in terms of how each person feels and how the other person sees them.

Interpersonal Attraction over Minimal Similarities

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It is widely known in psychology that similarities attract individuals in interpersonal relationships and love. We feel attracted to others with whom we share similar personality traits, interests, values, and other personal attributes. even minimal similarities, if they are essential, can lead to interpersonal attraction.

People Tend to Be Prone to Overgeneralization

However, this interpersonal attraction due to similarities may stem not from real similarities but rather from our overgeneralized beliefs that such observed personal similarities indicate our deeper and more fundamental similarities with another person.

Charles Chu, an assistant professor at Boston University, recently conducted a study showing how our perceptions of similarities prompt our false beliefs about having deeper similarities with the person.

As the author said,

“Our attraction to people who share our attributes is aided by the belief that those shared attributes are driven by something deep within us: one’s essence.”

More concretely, Charles Chu continues:

“To put it concretely, we like someone who agrees with us on a political issue, shares our music preferences, or simply laughs at the same thing as us not purely because of those similarities, but because those similarities suggest something more—this person is, in essence, like me, and as such, they share my views of the world at large.”

What Is “Psychological Essentialism”?

According to the author, “psychological essentialism,” specifically applied to people’s ideas about the self and individual identity, is what motivates this way of thinking. People have a tendency to “essentialize” many things in their perceptions of others. This seems to be a psychological phenomenon present across all human cultures.

Charles Chu defines “psychological essentialism” this way:

“To essentialize something is to define it by a set of deeply rooted and unchanging properties, or an essence.”

“For example, the category of ‘wolf’ is defined by a wolf essence, residing in all wolves, from which stems attributes such as their pointy noses, sharp teeth and fluffy tails as well as their pack nature and aggressiveness. It is unchanging in that a wolf raised by sheep is still a wolf and will eventually develop wolf-like attributes.”

Charles Chu explains that researchers have recently started to concentrate on the category of the self in terms of “psychological essentialism.” They found that we tend to essentialize the self in the same way that we essentialize other categories in our perception.

“To essentialize me is to define who I am by a set of entrenched and unchanging properties, and we all, especially in Western societies, do this to some extent. A self-essentialist then would believe that what others can see about us and the way we behave are caused by such an unchanging essence,”

Charles Chu said.

New Experiments on Self-Essentialism and Interpersonal Attraction

Researchers conduct studies to better understand how self-essentialism drives interpersonal attraction. Let us review a series of four experiments recently reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

First Experiment

In the first experiment, researchers asked participants their opinions on one of five randomly selected social issues: gun ownership, the death penalty, abortion, physician-assisted suicide, or animal testing. The other half of the participants read about someone who disagreed with their position, while the other half read about someone who shared their position. Then all participants answered questions about their general beliefs about self-essentialism. They also rated their level of interpersonal attraction to the fictitious person and how much they thought they shared a general worldview with that person.

The participants who were high in self-essentialism more frequently reported that they had a similar general perception of reality as the fictitious person who agreed with them. The participants also express attraction to them.

Second Experiment

In the second experiment, similar to the first one, researchers found the same results, further supporting their theory of self-essentialism. This time, researchers asked about another shared attribute: the participants’ propensity to overestimate or underestimate the number of colored dots on a series of computer slides.

In this case, the belief in an “essential self” made participants think that a single aspect of similarity implied that both the participant and another person see the world similarly. This, in turn, led to a higher attraction to that person.

Third Experiment

In a third experiment, researchers showed participants eight pairs of paintings and asked them to select their favorite from each pair. Some participants were fans of the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, while others were fans of the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky.

Then researchers informed half of each fan group that their artistic preference was intrinsic to their identity. Researchers informed the other half of participants that there was no correlation between their artistic preference and their identity.

Researchers then exposed the participants to two fictitious individuals. One of them shared their artistic preference, and the other did not.

Researchers found in this experiment that those whom they told that artistic preference was related to their essence were significantly more likely to express attraction to a hypothetical person with the same artistic preferences.

Fourth Experiment

In the fourth experiment, researchers classified participants as fans of one of the two artists. Then they gave them information about whether or not using one’s own essence was useful in perceiving other people.

In this experiment, researchers told one-third of the participants that essentialist thinking may result in inaccurate perceptions of others. Researchers told another third of the participants that essentialist thinking may result in accurate perceptions of others. They didn’t provide any information to the remaining third of participants.

Here are the striking results of the study: Participants, who were informed that essentialist thinking could result in accurate assessments of other people, believed that they shared a similar taste in art with them. They also felt attracted to these fictitious people.

What the Study Concluded about Interpersonal Attraction

The most surprising finding of the study was that something as simple as a shared appreciation of an artist could make people believe that other people would have similar worldviews. However, the author advised that self-essentialist thinking might not always be beneficial. Regarding this finding, Charles Chu noted that,

“I think any time when we’re making quick judgments or first impressions with very little information, we are likely to be affected by self-essentialist reasoning.”

“People are so much more complex than we often give them credit for, and we should be wary of the unwarranted assumptions we make based on this type of thinking.”

Thus, one can see that Self-Essentialist Reasoning Underlies the Similarity-Attraction Effect in interpersonal perception and attraction.

Take Notice of Your Partner’s Being Grateful to You

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Gratitude is the best attitude. Love and happiness are closely associated with being grateful. On the other hand, it is so great when your partner notices your being grateful.

Please recall the last time you were thankful for someone. This was most likely because someone did something good for you. You were grateful, and you thanked your partner for doing this for you. Right?

Feeling and expressing gratitude to others are great experiences associated with positive relationship outcomes, including one’s feeling of being happy.

But what happens when your partner in a relationship perceives your gratitude towards them? Do they really see it? Do you see when someone is grateful to you for what you did for them?

How Can I Know that my Partner Sees Me Being Grateful for Him or Her?

First, it is necessary to understand how people perceive each other’s gratitude. And only then can we answer the question and understand whether perceiving a partner’s gratitude also benefits you and the relationship. These perceptions can be accurate or not. Actually, partners may not really notice that their partner is grateful to them. What a bummer, isn’t it?

What might that entail when your partner is grateful? Consider the following relationships: Monica and Chandler, Rachel and Ross, and Phoebe and Joey. If someone asked Monica, Rachel, and Phoebe to rate their partner’s gratitude, what would they say?

They might rate their partner’s gratitude as 7, 8, or 9 on a 10-point scale, respectively.

Then, we need to compare their perceptions of their partner’s gratitude with their partner’s actual gratitude. Right? Only then can we determine whether they are accurate or not and whether they are under- or over-perceiving their partner’s gratitude.

When asked, Chandler, Ross, and Joey might say they are grateful to their partners, rating their gratitude on a scale of 6, 7, and 8, respectively.

Do these women notice their partners’ being grateful? How can we know this?

If each woman underestimated their partner’s gratitude by one point, they were all inaccurate and somewhat biased. The fact that Rachel rated her partner higher than Monica or Phoebe and that this matches the pattern of their partners’ levels of gratitude shows that they were also largely accurate. However, Ross’s actual rating of gratitude was higher than Chandler’s and Joey’s ratings.

The key point here is that partners may underestimate or exaggerate their partner’s gratitude. However, they are still accurate about the relative levels of gratitude of their partners. They are relatively accurate in their perception of their partner’s being grateful.

How Accurate and Biased Are Partners’ Gratitude Perceptions of Each Other?

Hasagani Tissera, the graduate research student at McGill University, collaborated with other researchers working at McGill, York University, and the University of Toronto to explore this question. In two studies, which they administered among 514 couples, they asked each partner in the couple to report on how grateful they are and how grateful they believe their partner is. We also asked how partners are satisfied with their relationships. Researchers administered their survey by asking partners independently of each other.

Then, researchers compared partners’ perceptions of their partners’ gratitude with their partners’ actual gratitude. Surprisingly, they discovered that partners tended to underestimate their partners’ gratitude. Nevertheless, they remained reasonably accurate about it.

Why so?

Why Do Partners Fail to Recognize Others’ Being Grateful?

Obviously, it makes sense. It would be good and important to know how grateful your partner is. This makes them feel satisfied.

What might be less apparent is why people often don’t see how grateful their partner is. Why do partners tend to be biased in a certain way? What does it entail in a relationship?

Thinking that the other person isn’t as grateful as they really are might keep partners from getting too comfortable and push them to keep working on making the relationship better. This is different from thinking their partners are more thankful than they really are. The latter could cause them to put in less effort in the future and put the relationship at risk.

How Biased Gratitude Perceptions Affect Relationship Satisfaction

In fact, a relationship depends on how much a person underestimates their partner’s appreciation. If they are drastically off, it is associated with a less happy relationship. However, a small mistake in the perception of gratitude can make a relationship happier.

If partners do not believe their partners are grateful, despite the fact that they are extremely grateful, this could lead to serious problems in a relationship. The large gaps in partners’ underestimation of gratitude are detrimental to relationship satisfaction. However, a small gap appears to be beneficial.