Learning goals:

1. Learning goals: • Understand human’s need for attachment and the benefits affiliation provides • Understand various theories of attraction • Identify characteristics desired in a relationship • Identify and understand key factors in promoting interpersonal attraction • Identify theories of love and distinguish between types of love

2. Need for affiliation • Humans have an innate basic need for affiliation. • Distraction hypothesis • Social comparison theory • Benefits of affiliation: • Sense of attachment • Social integration • Reassurance of worth • Sense of reliable alliance • Guidance • Opportunity for nurturance

3. Top 10 “Wish List” • Create a top ten wish list for characteristics you desire in your ideal mate.

4. Importance of Attraction • Characteristics all people desire in a mate: • Warmth • Competence • Physical attractiveness • While all people desire similar characteristics, there are considerable sex differences in the value or importance placed on each

5. Explanation of findings • Evolutionary theory • evolutionary psychology states that men and women are attracted to different characteristics in each other because these foster reproductive success

6. Key Factors: • proximity • mere exposure effect • physical attractiveness • matching hypothesis • halo effect • self-fulfilling prophecy • similarity effect • ingroup bias • social comparison • repulsion hypothesis • reciprocity effects • self-fulfilling prophecy • ingratiation

7. Defining Love • Companionate love • the feelings of intimacy and affection we feel for another person when we care deeply for the person, but do not necessarily experience passion or arousal in his or her presence. • Passionate love • is the feeling of intense longing, accompanied by physiological arousal, we feel for another person; when our love is reciprocated, we feel great fulfillment and ecstasy, but when it is not, we feel sadness and despair.

8. Theories of Love • triangular theory of love • different kinds of love consist of varying degrees of three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment • love styles • basic theories people have about love that guide their behavior in relationships. Six styles have been identified: Eros, Ludus, Storge, Pragma, Mania and Agape • attachment styles • your attachment as an adult will be influenced by your attachment style to your parents as a child

9. Love Styles: Eros: passionate, physical love Ludus: love as a game Storge: love that evolves out of friendship Pragma: pragmatic love Mania: emotional, roller-coaster love Agape: self-less love

10. Attachment Styles • secure attachment style • develops in those who have responsive caregivers as infants an is characterized by trust, a lack of concern with being abandoned, and the view that one is worthy and well-liked • avoidant attachment style • develops in those who have aloof and distant caregivers as infants and is characterized by a suppression of attachment needs, because attempts to be intimate have been rebuffed • anxious/ambivalent attachment style • develops in those who had inconsistent and overbearing caregivers as infants and is characterized by a concern that others will not reciprocate one’s desire for intimacy, resulting in higher than average levels of anxiety