Category Archives: communication of emotions

How Affectionate Touch Influences Our Romantic Relationships

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Men and women express their love for a partner in a relationship in a variety of verbal and nonverbal ways. Affectionate touch of various kinds is among the important nonverbal channels for lovers to express love in the intimate relationships. The previous article explained how affectionate touch in a relationship expresses our love for the loved one. Now we are talking about how interpersonal touch influences our romantic relationships.

What Affectionate Touch Tells Us About Love

Partners in romantic relationships often use touch to express their affection and intimacy. Touching various parts of the body, such as the abdomen and thighs, can evoke pleasurable feelings in both those who touch them and those who are touched.

A recent cross-cultural study found that touching behaviors like embraces, caresses, kisses, and hugs are universally present in various cultures around the world. Cultural differences, however, exist in how and when men and women affectionately touch each other. Even when lovers imagine a partner’s touch, they experience pleasurable and erogenous feelings.

Strangers can’t touch as much of your body as your romantic partner. Most people don’t mind when their partner touches their stomach and thighs, but they don’t like it when other people do. There are also more ways to show affection for a partner than in other social situations. A slow stroke is given to a romantic partner.

What Is Affection Exchange Theory?

Researchers employ the Affection Exchange Theory (AET) to understand the important effects and implications of affectionate touch in a relationship. The theory says that affectionate communication promotes the formation and maintenance of strong human pair bonds.

Expressions of affection are especially common in romantic couples. Such expressions affect the quality of a romantic relationship. Partners who are highly committed in a relationship often express various kinds of affection, including physical affection. Physical affection also positively affects relationships and partner satisfaction. However, partners with attachment insecurity less often use affectionate touch.

Most studies refer to affectionate communication as an array of behaviors and verbal displays of affection. For example, hugging was the only behavior explicitly related to touch among several affection communication domains which Horan and Booth-Butterfield’s study components examined.

How Touch Affects Our Relationships and Well-Being

In the study that specifically examined touch in romantic relationships, researchers found that the desire for touch is positively correlated with relationship quality. However, when partners experience attachment avoidance, they feel less desire for touch.

These promising results and the obvious value of touch in close interpersonal relationships encourage us to better understand the role of affectionate touch in romantic relationships.

Also, there appears to be a paucity of research on the psychological factors that influence the use of affectionate touch between partners. It is logical to assume, for instance, that loving partners would touch each other in their relationships. This would enhance communication and bring the benefits commonly associated with affectionate touch. In accordance with a study indicating that one’s own and one’s partner’s approach motives for touch predict greater daily relationship well-being, touch may also promote love between partners.

In an older study, Dainton, Stafford, and Canary found that physical affection (including touch behaviors) performed by a romantic partner and satisfaction with physical affection displays were positively associated with self-assessed love levels.

Thus, we see that our affectionate touch substantially influences our romantic relationships. How does our partner feel when we touch him or her? The previous article explained how affectionately touching the loved one lets him or her know about our love for them.

Surprisingly, however, little we know about the direct relationship between interpersonal touch and love, one of the most essential components of human romantic relationships, outside of this study.

In their recent study, Agnieszka Sorokowska and her colleagues investigated how affectionate touch influences romantic relationships across various cultures.

How Affectionate Touch Expresses Love to a Romantic Partner

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Men and women use many verbal and nonverbal ways to express their love for a partner in a relationship. Affectionate touch of various kinds is among the major nonverbal channels to express romantic love that lovers use in their intimate relationships.

Agnieszka Sorokowska and her colleagues explain the role of affectionate touch in romantic relationships.

What Is Affectionate Touch?

In romantic relationships, touch is the most common means of expressing intimacy. Loving partners touch each other significantly more frequently than other individuals. Those in romantic relationships show significantly more intimate touch with each other than those who are single. Even imagining a partner’s touch can evoke pleasurable and erogenous feelings.

Romantic partners are typically permitted to touch many more parts of the body than strangers or acquaintances. For instance, most people feel comfortable when their partner touches them in the abdomen and thighs, but not when other people do so. Moreover, affectionate touch in partnerships is more diverse than in other social interactions. When directed towards a romantic partner, a stroke, for example, is performed with a particularly low velocity.

In line with this, a recent cross-cultural study revealed that, despite significant intercultural differences, affectionate touch behaviors such as an embrace, caress, kiss, and hug are universally present in partnerships across the globe.

Why Touch Deprivation Is Bad

The tendency to use affectionate touch in romantic relationships seems natural. The negative effects of touch deprivation stand in stark contrast to the many advantages of affectionate touch in close relationships.

Touch deprivation is associated with anxiety, depression, and somatization. On the other hand, the higher prevalence of partner touch leads to better psychological well-being. Furthermore, interpersonal touch contributes to a lowered stress response by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and cortisol production. Touch can also reduce pain.

However, touching might not always be beneficial. Some people dislike touching. They may avoid touching others. Or have negative reactions to touching others. Such aspects of the relationship with a partner as low familiarity or a condition can make one feel a negative reaction to touch, such as disgust.

Why Affectionate Touch is Good in Close Relationships

Researchers use Affection Exchange Theory (AET) to interpret the significant implications and consequences of affectionate touch. According to this theory, affectionate communication is essential for “fostering the formation and maintenance of significant human pair bonds.” (Floyd, 2006, p. 165).

Expressions of affection are common among couples and related to the quality of romantic relationships. Men and women with higher levels of commitment in relationships usually physically display their affection toward their partners. The level of physical affection is also positively associated with relationship satisfaction and partner satisfaction while being negatively associated with attachment insecurity.

Affectionate communication typically includes multiple types of behaviors and verbal displays of affection. Men and women feel the desire for touch when their relationship quality is good.

Touch is strongly related to attachment patterns. When partners experience attachment avoidance, they are less likely to experience a desire for touch.

A Distinctive Smell Influences Our Emotions and Love

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Smell is the most mysterious of the five senses, with an evocative power that can transfer us to different times, places, emotional states, and even the state of love. The scent of a particular perfume has a distinctive smell that may remind us of a loved one. The aroma of baking bread may bring us back to childhood. A whiff of hospital disinfectant may cause us to feel uneasy. However, the impact of scent on human behavior extends beyond these evocative moments.

This article, as well as others on this blog, will review the intricate relationships between human scent—a distinctive smell—and our feelings, emotions, perceptions, and behaviors.

The Science of Smell: Knowing the Power of a Distinctive Smell

Understanding the science of smell (olfaction) is essential when we explore the role of smell in our perceptions, emotions, and behaviors. The olfactory organs and neurons in the nose interact with molecules in the air when we take a deep breath through the nose. The brain receives data from these neurons and uses it to determine what we are smelling.

The special feature of this sensory processing is that the limbic system of the brain, which controls emotion, memory, and behavior, is directly connected to the olfactory neurons. Because of this direct path, smells can have powerful and immediate effects on our feelings, perceptions, emotions, and behavior.

The “Proustian Phenomenon” of the Effect of Distinctive Smell on Memory

Marcel Proust (1871–1922), the famous French novelist, portrayed a character who vividly recalled long-forgotten childhood memories after consuming a madeleine cake dipped in tea. This ‘Proustian phenomenon’ illustrates how aromas can evoke powerful and vivid memories.

The olfactory bulb, which processes smell, has strong connections to the amygdala and hippocampus, which control emotion and memory, respectively. This unique relationship explains why a specific scent can immediately evoke intense emotional memories.

A Direct Connection Between Smell and Emotion

Scent may have a significant impact on our emotional state in addition to how we remember the past. A certain smell can elicit a variety of emotions, ranging from contentment and relaxation to disgust and anxiety. For example, lavender, which has a calming effect, is frequently used in aromatherapy to ease stress and promote sleep. On the other hand, the smell of spoiled food or rotten eggs may cause disgust and a strong desire to leave the area.

The Subtle Yet Significant Effect of Smell on Social Connections

Smell is a big part of how people connect with each other. Animals use scents called pheromones to signal to one another. The scientific idea of ‘chemical communication’ through these scents is well investigated in various species. Pheromones determine the smells that animals give off to communicate with each other.

Researchers are still investigating the effects of human pheromones on their emotions and behaviors. Some studies show that smells do play a role in how people get attracted to each other and form relationships. Men and women are more likely to hang out with others who have a scent they like.

The Power of Scent Is Subtle in Its Effect on Us

The influence of smell on human emotions, perceptions, and behaviors is profound and intricate. It is still not fully comprehended, yet it is clear that our sense of smell is intricately connected to our emotions, memories, and behaviors. We can anticipate uncovering more fascinating insights into the subtle yet potent role of scent in our life and love.

Other posts on this blog show the role of various sensory experiences, including smell, on human preferences in romantic relationships. Some studies, for example, revealed the most attractive smells for love. Other studies explored the tactile and kinesthetic senses of love.

How Doctors Can Be More Compassionate to Patients

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The lack of time, or “time famine,” is the major problem nowadays that deters us from being compassionate to others in our daily encounters. This problem also does not allow doctors to allot sufficient time to interact with patients compassionately in the manner in which they would like to do so. Many doctors regret that they do not have the time to treat patients with compassion, as they would like to.

The problem is specifically intractable in medicine. Healthcare providers in clinics often feel they cannot sufficiently care for their patients the way they would like.

It’s hard to think of something more serious than telling a patient bad medical news. Can medical educators teach physicians how to show real compassion for patients professionally?

How to Show Compassion Professionally

Let’s consider how the researchers from Johns Hopkins University taught cancer doctors the way to support their patient encounters.

Here is a script that doctors can use in their medical practice. Beginning 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, by the end of the appointment, the doctors say:

“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.”

It appeared that when doctors shared these words with their patients, the patients perceived their doctors as warmer, more caring, and more compassionate care providers. These patients experienced less anxiety than other patients.

The study demonstrated not only how compassion matters but how quickly a doctor can display compassion to a patient, even in forty seconds and in 99 words, which eased a patient’s anxiety.

How Much Time Does It Take to Express Compassion?

Other studies have supported this discovery about how little time doctors need to express compassion.

Stephen Trzeciak and his colleagues conducted the study in the Netherlands that showed that it takes only 38 seconds for doctors to express compassion when they deliver bad news to patients to ease the patient’s anxiety.

The study of Rachel Weiss and her colleagues demonstrated that the longer compassionate statements, the better they reduce patient anxiety.

How to Express Compassion in Daily Social Communication

What about other daily situations involving social connections? Can we spare a few seconds to communicate with someone close to us, with our loved one or friend, or with our neighbor, expressing simple words of compassion?

  • Great job today. I know it’s been tough this past week. I see how hard you are working and I’m proud to be working alongside you.
  • I really admire how you are rolling with the punches. I want you to know you’re not in it alone. I’m here, too, and we’ll figure it out together.
How Helping Others Could Make You Feel Less Rushed by Gabriella Kellerman (2023)

Keep in mind that even the brief moments of your time given compassionately to someone else can make a difference in their life as well as in yours.

Give Compassionate Love to Each Other!

We need to rely on each other. We must care about each other. We need compassion for each other to feel good, be good, live well, and do what we are doing well. We need compassionate love for each other to do well in our personal lives.

The modern way of life, with its daily rush and lack of time, presents increasing barriers to personal connections. Nevertheless, we can pursue compassionate social behavior and feel that we have time to spare for it.

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.

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.”

It Is Sensible to Be a Modestly Expressive Woman

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The article presents sensible quotes from Ovid’s “Ars Amatoria” with advice to be a modestly expressive woman in laughter and movements.

Ovid was a well-known poet who lived in ancient Rome from 43 BCE to 17 CE. For centuries, his poetry trilogy “Ars Amatoria” (The Art of Love) has been popular among educated and noble people. Many modern humanities scholars have read and highly praised Ovid’s “The Art of Love.” In his poems, Ovid shared his wisdom on love matters with Roman men and women. He advises them on how to attract, entice affection, and keep a relationship with a partner. He also teaches them how to use the art of love in their love affairs.

The Romans lived in a different era and led a different lifestyle than we do today. But I believe that educated men and women today can learn something interesting and useful about love from Ovid’s poetry collections. This is why I’ve included excerpts from these books on this website for those interested in learning more about how ancient Romans lived and loved.

The poetry collection “Ars Amatoria” offers contemporary men and women sensible guidance on how to find, attract, and keep a partner in a relationship. The first two books of this poetry collection by Ovid offer suggestions to men on how to approach, court, and entice women. The third book teaches women the poetic wisdom of how to be attractive, lovable, and maintain loving relationships with men.

The Art of Roman Love Shared in my Previous Blog Posts

In previous blog posts, I shared some of Ovid’s poetry-based advice for men. Among the topics discussed in these beautiful verses are the following:

“How to Find Her“, “Search for Love While Walking“, “Triumphs that Are Good to Attract a Woman“, “How to Win Her“, “How to Be Attentive to Her“, and “How to Make Promises and Deceive”.

The articles on this blog also include Ovid’s wisdom of love for women on “How to Appear,” “How to Keep Taste and Elegance in Hair and Dress,” “How to Use Makeup,” and “How to Hide Defects in Appearance.”

Here are the new poetic quotes with advice from Book III of Ovid’s “Ars Amatoria,” addressed to girls and women. Ovid teaches them to be moderately expressive women who are modest in their laughter and movements.

The Ovid Advice to Be a Modestly Expressive Woman in Laughter and Movements

“If you’re teeth are blackened, large, or not in line

from birth, laughing would be a fatal error.

Who’d believe it? Girls must even learn to laugh,

they seek to acquire beauty also in this way.

Laugh modestly, a small dimple either side,

the teeth mostly concealed by the lips.

Don’t strain your lungs with continual laughter,

but let something soft and feminine ring out.

One girl will distort her face perversely by guffawing:

another shakes with laughter, you’d think she’s crying.

That one laughs stridently in a hateful manner,

like a mangy ass braying at the shameful mill.

Where does art not penetrate? They’re taught to cry,

with propriety, they weep when and how they wish.

Why! Aren’t true words cheated by the voice,

and tongues forced to make lisping sounds to order?

Charm’s in a defect: they try to speak badly:

they’re taught, when they can speak, to speak less.

Weigh all this with care, since it’s for you:

learn to carry yourself in a feminine way.

And not the least part of charm is in walking:

it attracts men you don’t know, or sends them running.

One moves her hips with art, catches the breeze

with flowing robes, and points her toes daintily:

another walks like the wife of a red-faced Umbrian,

feet wide apart, and with huge paces.

But there’s measure here as in most things: both the rustic’s stride,

and the more affected step should be foregone.

Still, let the parts of your lower shoulder and upper arm

on the left side, be naked, to be admired.

That suits you pale-skinned girls especially: when I see it, I want to kiss your shoulder, as far as it’s shown.”

Kline, A. S. (2001). Translation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria: The Art of Love.

Gratitude and Love in Cultural Perspective

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The grateful attitude and emotions toward other people and life are referred to as gratitude. When we express gratitude for what other people and life have given us, we experience several situational emotions. When we are grateful, thankful, and appreciative to someone for something, we can feel a variety of positive emotions. Gratitude and love commonly go hand in hand and are closely related to each other.

Gratitude and Love in Our Life

As I showed in another article, gratitude and love frequently go together. Not only does the experience of gratitude entail the emotion of love, but love also implies the expression of gratitude.

Love frequently involves expressions of gratitude and appreciation. Love, gratitude, and appreciation are deeply relational feelings that encompass a wide range of dispositions, moods, and situational emotions and feelings. Participants use a variety of methods to express their feelings of love, including loving others, loving oneself, receiving love, and feeling thankful for love.

A Chinese Cultural Perspective on Gratitude and Love

The indigenous Chinese concept of “enqing” means grateful love (Chen & Li, 2007). This type of love includes the feelings of responsibilities and obligations associated with a spouse’s feelings of appreciation, gratitude, and indebtedness for what the partner does for the marriage. The origins of “enqing” are in Chinese relationship orientation and the traditional Confucian value of duty in marriage.

While Western marital intimacy is characterized by feelings of togetherness and compatibility, Chinese marital intimacy is characterized by feelings of admiration and gratitude.

The Chinese Concept of “Enqing”

People in traditional Chinese society typically place little emphasis on marital intimacy. Instead, “enqing”—the expression of gratitude and admiration—may bind Chinese couples closely together.

Many researchers have identified “enqing” as the primary element of Chinese marital affection and love (e.g., Li & Chen, 2002; Tang, 1991; see for a review, Karandashev, 2019). In traditional Chinese marriage, “enqing” plays a central role in marital affection and love. The four pillars of Chinese couples’ love are:

(a) feelings of gratitude,

(b) admiration,

(c) togetherness, and

(d) compatibility

(Chen & Li, 2007).

How Gratitude and Love Develop in Chinese Marriage

Why and how does this kind of grateful love between married people grow?

In traditional Chinese culture, parents frequently arrange marriages. Under these conditions, many people got married without knowing each other well. Moreover, even after they get married, Chinese cultural norms do not consider the intimate relationship between the couple as important. The “enqing“, or expression of gratitude and admiration, develops from conjugal love and role fulfillment. That is what keeps Chinese couples together and close.

People experience intimacy more frequently in modern Taiwanese (Chinese) marriages than ever before. However, the presence of “enqing” remains. Modern Western ideas about love have an effect on Chinese marriages. Nevertheless, the traditional Chinese idea of “enqing” has not gone away (Li & Chen, 2002).

How the Expression of Gratitude Differs in Chinese and American Cultures

A series of cross-cultural studies examined the impact of verbal and nonverbal expressions of appreciation on the quality of romantic relationships in “high-context, collectivistic cultures and low-context, individualistic cultures” (Bello et al., 2010, p. 294).

The authors discovered that in cultures such as the United States and China, appreciation takes different forms and plays different roles in relationships. Participants from both countries listed specific ways they express gratitude in a romantic relationship.

The results show that Chinese participants prefer nonverbal expressions of appreciation over verbal ones, while American participants favor both verbal and nonverbal ones.

Overall, data showed that Americans use significantly more frequent expressions of gratitude in love than Chinese people. This is mostly due to the extensive use of verbal expressions in the United States. Chinese people, on the other hand, use more indirect ways to express gratitude in love than Americans see for a review, Karandashev, 2019).

Emotions Associated With Gratitude

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We can characterize gratitude as the grateful attitudes toward other people and life. Gratitude also involves several situational emotions when we experience gratitude for what other people and life give to us. We can experience several positive emotions when we are grateful, thankful, and appreciative to someone for something.

What Is the Lived Experience of Gratitude?

Researchers from Sofia University in California, USA, Patty Hlava and John Elfers conducted a qualitative study to investigate the ways in which individuals experience gratitude throughout their lives. The authors also investigated the advantages of practicing and expressing gratitude, both for relationships with others and personal emotions. What does it mean for people to be grateful for their lives, and how do they feel gratitude in their somatic feelings? How does gratitude benefit our relationships, and how does it change our relationships with others?

How Emotional Is the Lived Experience of Gratitude?

In this qualitative study, the authors explored the individual narratives of the lived emotional experience of gratitude. Some descriptions identified the feelings elicited by a specific event. The other descriptions identified the generalized descriptions that people reminisce over in a wide range of examples (Hlava & Elfers, 2014).

The Gratitude Emotions of Acceptance, Comfort, and Security

Many participants in their narratives expressed emotions of acceptance of themselves and of the world associated with a sense of rightness or completeness. They also described feelings of comfort and security.

I can just be in the world and not in conflict with it. (Jennifer)

Yeah, I felt real grounded, and centered, and refreshed. (Mimi)

There is this thread of deep contentment that runs like an underground river through everything. (Albert)

I’m grateful because there’s that unconditional love and that safety and security, which makes me feel strong and powerful. (Melanie)

(Hlava & Elfers, 2014, p. 447).

The Gratitude Emotions of Being Blessed

Participants described the feelings of being fortunate, lucky, and blessed as a common theme. It was a sense of personal worth and the value of the self in relation to others. This experience of gratitude, however, was not associated with feelings of guilt or indebtedness for the benefit.

Some participants recognized their responsibility to give back in response to the gift. They feel a desire to act on that responsibility.

A sense of being blessed and of savoring every little moment. (Sue)

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to be worthy of their faith in me. (Louise)

I just remember feeling so overwhelmed with feeling blessed and feeling just joyful, feeling just fortunate. (Betty) I get really excited, and I literally feel giddy. Then I feel lucky, and then I feel humbled. Then I feel like I should share it. (Melanie)

(Hlava & Elfers, 2014, p. 447).

The Gratitude Emotions of Joy

Participants described the positive emotion-experience of gratitude in terms of the pleasant sensations of euphoria, joy, and happiness.

A wonderful state of euphoria; pleasurable sensations, both mental and physical; happiness of memories. (Doris)

I was smiling, on top of my feeling a sense of joy in my face, and then a welling up in my eyes. (Betty)

I feel lighter and definitely happier. Gratitude is like sunshine. (Sarita) Then I was just really happy. I thought I was like Disneyland happy. (Link)

(Hlava & Elfers, 2014, p. 447).

The Gratitude Emotions of Love

The experience of love frequently expresses gratitude. Both love and gratitude are highly relational emotions, and both embody a broad affective range of feelings and contexts. Participants expressed the sentiments of love in a variety of ways, such as by loving another, loving oneself, being loved, and feeling grateful for being loved. The sentiments of love were also felt as being accepted, supported, protected, and understood.

Overwhelming love, I would say. In love with them, and feeling loved by them. (Betty)

I feel love. (pause) It’s kind of funny; because I think love and gratitude are almost like twins. You don’t have to love someone you’re grateful to, but it certainly seems to enhance gratitude and a lot of times if I’m grateful, really, I’m feeling loved. (Nancy)

How grateful I was to have been involved and been a part of such a wonderful and loving family. I really was overcome with just a feeling of gratefulness and almost to the point where it brought me to tears. (Lou)

(Hlava & Elfers, 2014, p. 448).