Till now love has remained as a mystery, for some it was a cupid's arrow while some related it with hormones but recent study at the University of California Los Angeles in association with eHarmony could prove the age old aphorism that 'Love is Blind'.
The study found interesting sides of the people who are in love as they were less likely to notice attractive members of the opposite sex. Gian Gonzaga a lead author of the study said, "Feeling love for your romantic partner appears to make everybody else less attractive, and the emotion appears to work in very specific ways in enabling you to push thoughts of that tempting other out of your mind."
While co-author Martie Haselton, an associate professor of psychology and communication studies at UCLA said, "It's almost like love puts blinders on people."
During the study the researchers asked 120 undergraduate to review a number of photos of attractive people of the opposite sex and also asked them to find the one to whom they were physically attracted.
The participants were then clustered into three groups; the first group was asked to pen the time when they were in too much love with their partner, second group were asked to write the time when they were most sexually attracted to their partner while the third group were asked to write about anything they wanted.
While writing the participants were instructed to forget the attractive people they saw in the photographs but were also to jot in the margin of their write up if something like this come to their mind.
The result showed that the first group was six times less likely to admit thinking about the attractive photos than who wrote on random subjects, also this group when asked to remember the attractive people they came up with fewer details of the physical appearance.
“People in the love group found it easy to push an attractive other out of their mind even though we made those thoughts tempting,” explained Haselton.
Gonzaga and Haselton consider that the study provides ample clue of the biological mechanism behind the emotion that make people behave in certain way when they are in love.
“Love is a commitment device, which has evolved to make us identify and stick with a long-term mate long enough to raise a child. Our ancestors who had this ability were more successful in raising their offspring to maturity, so the adaptation got passed along to us,” Haselton said.
The results published in the Journal Evolution and Human Behavior is steady with the earlier findings in which people in such relationship find other less attractive. But earlier study did not examine whether love was the driving pattern.
“It could be that people who end up in relationships might be the people who don't look at others. This is the first direct causal evidence between feeling love and defending a relationship from external threats,” said Haselton.
“One of the biggest threats to a relationship is an attractive alternative to your loved one. Or that attractive woman at work or the hot guy you meet in the bar," Gonzaga said. "In subtle ways that you might not even notice, the gushy feelings you get when you think of your partner help you fend off these threats.”
This study is indeed a study which has looked into the emotion and strengths of love.
null
|
|
Comments:
