Positive Aspects Of Love

An old proverb states, “A shared joyed is a double joy, shared sorrow is a half sorrow”. This simple concept is much easier said than done. To feel joy double and feel sorrow half, we must develop and cultivate relationships with others. Many character traits cause relationships to falter. Throughout life people encounter many relationships that cause a variety of emotions, envy, greed, forgiveness, and loneliness. Through American literature, students will understand how crucial the effect emotions have on the quality and outcome in human relationships.

In Barbara Fredrickson’s Selections from “Love 2.0: How our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do and Become”, our conventional viewpoint on love is changed so that it can lead to a happier and healthier life. Similarly, in Karen Armstrong’s “Homo Religiosus”, she talks about religion and culture to explain the meaning of life and help people reach internal happiness. Both of these authors make sure that people forget about their previous beliefs so that they can reach Fredrickson’s system of “positivity resonance”, or Armstrong’s idea of internal happiness, or antta.

Ben-Shahar speaks correctly while discussing how individuals must give themselves permission to experience negative feelings before they reach the point where they can completely experience the positive feelings. Therefore, positive feelings are inadvertently blocked by negative feelings. Dr. Mathieu (2011) from Psychology Today, discusses how “providing so many positive solutions can inadvertently blame people for their suffering” (para. 3). Henceforth, whenever people see articles on being happy and social media posts where everyone has their happiest face on, they do not accept the it is okay to have negative feelings as well. Ben-Shahar discusses how many people feel inferior while experiencing negative feelings, but in reality every person except the dead and psychopathic experience the same feelings. Counseling Directory (2016) identifies that “we are continually setting ourselves up to fail” (para. 5). Furthermore, acting as part of the human race means that individuals are imperfect. Striving to reach perfection is the beginning of failure because of the impossibility forever block the

In this global era of evolving civilization, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the fascinating fact about love. Love is a feeling of intimacy, warmth, and attachment. Love is inevitable and it plays a vital role in human life as Janie uses her experience with the pear tree to compare each of her relationships, but it is not until Tea Cake that she finds “a bee to her bloom.” (106).

Part of human nature is maintaining pleasant and enjoyable relationships with others. Once a person has formed an emotional connection to another, a bond that has formed over a long period of time, the impression of that person is nearly obstinate. Though Arlene Tribbia’s poem, “Sure,” begins with a description of a brother’s misconduct, she ends her piece with a memory that conveys what the character misses about him. The attachment that a person may have regarding others affects his or her emotional perception towards them, and causes him or her to overlook imperfections and disagreeable actions.

The original study “The nature of love” was focused on gaining more understanding of human development (Hock, 2013). It involved a series of experiments done by Harry Harlow in 1958, in which he

Barbara Fredrickson is a positive psychology researcher at the University of North Carolina and she published a landmark paper that provides surprising insights about positive thinking and its impact on the lives of people. Her work is among the most referenced and cited in her field. She tested the impact of positive emotions on the brain by setting up an experiment. During this experiment, she divided her research subjects into 5 groups and showed each group different film clip. The first two groups saw clips that created positive emotions, the third group saw images that were neutral and produced no significant emotion, and the last two groups were shown clips that created negative emotions. At the end of the experiment, participants who experienced positive emotions could think of more possibilities in life; showing that positive emotions broaden the sense of possibility and even open the mind up to more options. In her paper, "The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions", Barbara Fredrickson concludes, “Positive emotions promote discovery of novel and creative actions, ideas and social bonds, which in turn build that individual’s personal resources; ranging from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological resources.” (Fredrickson, p. 1367 ) The lives of Anne Frank and Winston Churchill are proof

If you’re not paying attention, the mind can be a tricky labyrinth. The less you know about it, the more inexplicable and frightening it becomes. For example, why do seemingly benign elephants wreak havoc upon villages? In “An Elephant Crackup,” Charles Siebert explores the aberrant nature of these elephants and correlates them to their traumatizing upbringing, deprived of community and kinship. The biochemistry of the human mind, analyzed in “Love2.0” by Barbara Frederickson, serves as a worthy addendum to Siebert’s conjecture. “Love2.0” explains that the brain, hormones, and nerves work in unison to build emotional fortitude, stimulate oneself, and express positivity resonance. Siebert’s ideas of elephant culture and trans-species psyche can put Frederickson’s theory of emotions into practice. The absence of certain hormones within elephants, provided their fragmented community, can explain their volatile outbreaks. Alternatively, the reinstitution of human parental roles into elephant culture can help reconstruct their broken emotional states of elephants and rebuild their resilience; this healing process can also extend to humans.

One boundless power in our universe is the power of love, which rips down barriers and creates a world where everything is in harmony. Love’s immense strength can be portrayed throughout literature. In Shakespeare's play, Romeo and Juliet, and John Green’s book, Fault in Our Stars, the theme that love overpowers everything is conveyed throughout the pages. In Shakespeare’s play, two-star crossed lovers fall in love despite the quarrel of their families. In John Green’s book, two cancer-stricken teenagers fall in love despite their limitations. The theme of love overpowering everything is evident in both stories through the external conflicts that failed to prevent their love, the lovers going great lengths to see each other, and deaths of the other lover.

Love is an abstract emotion that society has always tried to describe. Artists, poets, musicians, and many others have attempted to pinpoint what exactly constitutes love, but none have been successful. Through a conversation between two couples, Carver shows that love is an emotion too ambiguous to be defined by words.

While people are often able to identify when they feel the emotion love, love itself seems to defy definition.  In her polemic “Against Love”, Laura Kipnis argues that love cannot exist as traditional expressions of love such as marriage, monogamy, and mutuality.  However, in her argument, she defines love incorrectly by equating love to expressions of love. This definition lacks a component essential to understanding the abstract concept of love: emotion. Recognizing love as emotion helps us realize that, contrary to Kipnis’ argument love by nature transcends all expressions of love. Love is subjective and exists in any and all forms. In her argument that love cannot survive as conventional expressions of love, Kipnis ignores the nature of love as emotion in favor of equating love to different expressions of love. Love is a force which exists above expressions of love; a true understanding of love can only come from an assessment of how individuals, not societies, respond to the emotion.

Fredrickson, 2001 . The undoing effect of positive emotions. Motivation and Emotion, vol. 24, pp. 237–258.

Chapter 3 explores the concept of universally shared basic emotions, an idea that was first advanced as a theory by Charles Darwin. Paul Ekman and Jakk Panksepp studied the concept of

Throughout history, emotions, whether they are positive or negative, have played a major role in how people establish emotional connections with each other. Whether these emotions create beneficial or detrimental connections between other individuals depends on the perspective it is viewed from. This theme of different perspectives on emotions can be seen in Susan Faludi’s “The Naked Citadel”, where she reports on the horrible incidents at the Citadel that result in two opposing opinions, one that is in favor of these acts and one that is against it. The role this theme has in establishing emotional connections with other individuals can be seen in Barbara Fredrickson’s article “Selections from Love 2.0: How our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do and Become”, in which she discusses the effects that positive emotions has on the human body and in creating connections. With so many different feelings and perspectives that can be seen throughout the Citadel, feelings are bound to play a major role in how these perspectives will be developed. Feelings are shown to be positively affecting how emotional connections are developed between individuals involved with The Citadel because they allow for people to have a medium to connect with.

Another similar theory proposed by Patterson in 1982 deals with providing information, regulating interaction, and expressing intimacy. “However, Patterson (1982) also proposed two other functional categories, social control and service-task functions, neither of which is identified in the earlier classification systems” (Edinger and Patterson, 1983, p. 31). The main function, and more readily accepted is social control. Social control, or attempting to change the behavior of another, is unique because it describes a motivational contrast with the function of intimacy (Edinger and Patterson, 1983, p. 31). Intimacy, or the underlying affectionate reaction towards another, also deals with negative and positive reactions. The positive affect could result in concern for, liking, love, or interest in another; however, the negative ends results in dislike or hate (Edinger and Patterson, 1983, p 31). “…The social control function is characterized by independence of affect and nonverbal behavior…in some cases the real affect is opposite to the affect represented behaviorally; for example, when smiling at, gazing at, and standing close to a disliked superior to win favor with that person”(edinger and Patterson, 1983, p. 31). In this case, by standing close, smiling at and gazing at a disliked superior the person is using intimacy to gain