This post is about love. This post is about science. This post is also about psychology, and the nonsensical (but extremely fun) theories you can come up in the field. For the next minutes, allow me to guide you through a psychological theory I have been working on, and one that I wish to put out there for collaboration.

The Empirical Nature of Love

Love. Probably humanity’s biggest blessing — and perhaps, also it’s biggest curse. Whether this love we’re speaking of refers to the Christian “agape”, the Freudian “eros”, or something else entirely, we can all agree we’re sick of seeing our friends getting engaged and spamming our Facebook newsfeed with their happy pictures, and overly sentimental love songs.

Actually, that song is great. Never mind.

Psychologists have attempted to empirically understand love in many different ways. Social psychologists, in particular, really like Sternberg’s “love triangle” (1986) which differentiates our “little curse” into three forms: passion, intimacy, and commitment [from a combination of these forms, one gets different types of love expressions, like companionate love, infatuation, romantic love, fatuous love, liking, etc.]. Neuroscientists, on the other hand, prefer a very different kind of approach to understanding love, one which examines the brain mechanisms and evolutionary reasons for the existence of love. Some studies suggest that both romantic and maternal love are associated with activation in the reward systems of the brain (Aron et al., 2005; Bartels & Zeki, 2000; Bartels & Zeki, 2004), while the caudate nucleus, an area previously associated with obsessive thoughts, is apparently mostly associated in romantic love (Acevedo et al., 2008).

Love, reward, and obsession…all somewhat related in our heads. Now, that’s interesting.

To reduce love to basic brain structures and neurochemical firing patterns is a little reductionistic, though I myself have no problem with that. But what I am mostly interested in is neither the biological expressions of love nor the evolutionary reasoning for its existence. Rather, I am mostly interested in the cognitive-emotional understanding of how one falls in love, why some people tend to fall in love with the same “type” of person over and over again, and of course, why some people become so immersed and obsessed with the love-process to the point where bad things can happen.

In searching for answers, I came across many ideas, all seemingly capturing some truthful aspect of the whole. None, however, really telling the full story.

Well, until I came across the idea of prototypes. 

Prototype Applications in Psychology

As far as I know, the application of prototypes in psychology started with Eleanor Rosch (1978). In her research, she postulated that one of the major ways in which the mind organizes and processes information is by the means of creating mental categories so that different elements can be sorted and placed in accordance to what category they belong to. So, if you look a horse and you’ve heard it being called a “horse” before, next time to see an animal with the features of a horse, you recognize it as a horse.

Then again, maybe it’s a pony and your prototype failed you.

The idea of prototypes is not only limited to perceptual objects, either. In fact, it has been applied to several areas in psychology: psychoanalysts have linked prototype formation to ego defenses (Spitz, 1961); bio-psychologists have demonstrated learning and prototype abstraction in rhesus monkeys (Smith, Redford, Haas, 2008); developmental psychologists have used prototypes to articulate the development of moral categories in adolescents (Lapsley, Hill, 2008).

Now, want to hear what’s a little weird? None of these psychologists cited above seem to be really talking about the same thing. This is why it’s crucial that I define exactly what I mean when I’m talking about a “prototype” – so that we don’t get it confused with other conceptualizations of a prototype in psychology (and yet, concurrently understanding why they are in some way also related).

The Prototype Theory of Romantic Relationships: The Basics

My theory, succinctly put, is this: (1) there is a psychological tendency for people to build a mental prototype of a significant other, much as they do for other abstract concepts of life, (2) this construction is a gradual developmental process, and (3) it significantly impacts the way one comes to develop one’s relational, emotional, and romantic attitudes. If this process is developed in a healthy way, (4) the individual is expected to engage in healthy relationships with a mental prototype that is strong, but also flexible; (5) if developed in a dysfunctional way, one could be expected to tend towards obsession, inability to settle in a relationship, or experience a range of other relational difficulties.

I guess I should probably go over each of these now…

(1) There is a psychology tendency for people to build a mental prototype of a significant other. What I mean by this is the following: as we grow and develop, we build mental concepts for several different things. One of these things, I would suggest, is what we think of as “love”, or as “having a partner”, or as a “significant other”; in other words, we build in our heads a vague idea of what kind of person we are attracted to and want to be there for us.

Now, there is a little catch here. There is a huge debate in psychology, on almost any topic, on whether things are determined by one’s biological structures, or by one’s environment. One would natural raise a question then, on whether these prototypes are a direct influence of our genes and brain structures, or of one’s environment. For instance, if a kid grows up watching TV and sees the same actor/actress all the time, is this kid rigged to like that particular kind of person? My answer to this is: there is really no way of knowing this for sure because we can’t actually separate truly what is determined by one’s genes and what’s determined by one’s environment. Why not? Because they are always interacting, they influence each other, and they are expressed in one another. The debate of nature vs. nurture is usually very poorly understood in psychology, and especially outside of psychology, and I intend to go far from it in this model. Regardless, the point stands unchanged: in some complex multi-determined, but entirely psychologically consistent way, we build a mental prototype of who we are attracted to.

(2) The construction of this prototype is a gradual developmental process. What I mean by this is that we are not talking about something that suddenly happens when you’re 13. As one grows and understands the complexity of the world and its people, all kinds of mental prototypes “update” themselves to keep up with the new complexities. Suddenly the world isn’t black and white anymore. Suddenly good and bad are sometimes hard to tell apart. People aren’t always happy or sad. It would then also make sense that as one grows, this idealization of a prototype is molded to allocate the realities of relationships, particularly, of what envisions as a significant other.

If the two ideas above are true, than it would also follow that the (3) prototype would significantly impact the way one comes to develop one’s relational, emotional, and romantic attitudes. I mean…it just seems like it would follow, no? Not much to explain here – though imagine how many correlational studies I would have to run to prove each of the statements above. Here’s to a decade of grant applications just for that!

(4) The individual is expected to engage in healthy relationships with a mental prototype that is strong, but also flexible. But if developed in a dysfunctional way, (5) one’s prototype could be expected to tend towards obsession, inability to settle, or a range of other relational difficulties. This is the most crucial part of this model, and the one I need to work on the most. In the way I conceptualize it so far, we can understand the prototype through an inversely related, optimally-seeking relationship between two properties: prototype flexibility and prototype strength.

Now, I can feel you’re getting bored, so let me go through this quickly, before we arrive at the real fun.

The property of flexibility pretty much states that in order for the prototype to be complex, healthy, and realistic, it has to allow for a range of characteristics. So for instance, if one develops a mental prototype of an ideal significant other that can have any skin color, any eye color, any height, or any weight, as long as the person is nice, well…damn, the world would be a better place, wouldn’t it? Anyway, that person in particular would have a very “flexible” prototype, in that a lot of different people could be a good “fit” for this prototype.

Now, think of someone whose prototype is “someone with blue eyes, blonde, super nice, high IQ, vegan, and always agrees with you no matter what”. Well…good luck on Tinder! We could probably say that this particular person has a very strong prototype, and in many ways, one that is so rigid, that one would either (a) not be able to find that person anywhere, or (b) once in a relationship, would impose a distressingly unrealistic standard on the other.

What I want to do, hopefully in collaboration with others, is to devise a scale that properly quantifies both the “flexibility” and “strength” properties of the prototype, and ultimately be able to relate these measures with scales that assess healthy (and pathological) relationship habits.

Prototype Approximations

Because the prototype is a normative internal cognitive construct that speaks of one’s ideal “other”, one could make a strong argument that a perfect prototype (i.e. EXACTLY the prototype, in every conceivable way) could not exist outside a person’s mind. Still, many with strong prototypes will engage in relationships, or obsessions, perhaps because they find suitable “prototype approximations”. Though this sort of thinking would most likely be heavily subconscious, one could still rationalize at the conscious level and understand through the approximation what one’s prototype actually is.

However, in order for us to make a proper assessment, we would need some basic universal traits that we could think of as being central for any prototype. Physical attractiveness, for instance, must certainly be one, for most people. But what about desire for dominance? Narcissistic reflection? Complementarity? It’s not empirically clear if people seek in the “other” one’s own reflection, or exactly the opposite. It’s also not empirically clear if people with similar personalities would necessarily be a better match than two people with completely arbitrary personalities, in relation to one another.

So how to go about finding “universal” factors for a generalisable prototype questionnaire that could “rate” a given “approximation” to one’s internal, inaccessible prototype? I leave this open-ended for now — with hopes to answer it in a future blogpost…

More To Come…

This post is already long enough for this kind of topic, so I will stop for now. This is not something I mean to just drop here and expect you to buy straight away. Rather, it is something I’d like you to consider (not only my proposed model, but the questions it attempts to answer). In the future, we will address other facets of the theory such as prototype deconstruction, the role of reality, the influence of cognitive fetishes in prototype determination, and of course, my glorious attempts at using mathematics and statistics to make this all work – somehow.

Stay tuned.

References

Acevedo, B., & Aron, A. (2009). Does a long-term relationship kill romantic love? Review of Gen- eral Psychology, 13, 59-65.

Acevedo, B., Aron, A., Fisher, H., Tsapelas, I., Katz, S., & Brown, L. (2008). The neural correlates of long-term romantic love. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Associ- ation of Relationship Research, Providence, RI.

Aron, A., Fisher, H., Mashek, D. J., Strong, G., Li, H. & Brown, L. L. (2005). Reward, motivation, and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love. Journal of Neurophysiology,94, 327-337.

Bartels, A., & Zeki, S. (2000). The neural basis of romantic love. NeuroReport, 11, 3829-3834.

Bartels, A., & Zeki, S. (2004). The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love. NeuroImage,21, 1155-1166.

Lapsley , D. K. , & Hill , P. L. ( 2008 ). On dual processing and heuristic approaches to moral cognition . Journal of Moral Education , 37 , 313 –332.

Rosch, E., “Principles of categorization” in Rosch, E. and B.B. Lloyd, (eds.), Cognition and Categorization (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. 1978).

Smith, J. D., Redford, J. S., & Haas, S. M. (2008). Prototype abstraction by monkeys (macaca mulatta). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 137(2), 390-401. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.137.2.390

Sternberg, R. J. (1986). A triangular theory of love. Psychological Review, 93, 119-135.

Spitz, R. A. 1961 Early Prototypes of Ego Defenses J. Am. Psychoanal. Assoc. 9:626-651 – See more at: http://www.pep-web.org.proxy.library.nd.edu/document.php?id=psc.025.0417a#sthash.7lreOvW4.dpuf

Spitz, R. A., Emde, R. N., & Metcalf, D. R. (1970). Further prototypes of ego formation: A working paper from a research project on early development. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 25, 417-441.