Audio Click --- Positive Energy Chapter 08 Attraction and Relationships (3)
《Positive Energy》
Chapter 08: Attraction and Relationships (3)
This conclusion is an important implication for those who want to find true love: if you want to have a successful date, don't go for a walk in the countryside or take a meditation class; you should go to the playground, go to the bridge, go to a theater, or go to a movie theater to see a horror movie. Therefore, the choice of location is also closely related to whether we can stimulate the positive energy of love.
The principle of "performance" also helps us explain many other interesting aspects of love.
Unrequited love, which inspires the energy of attraction, often makes people more eager for lovers who can't get it. The result of unrequited love is often dramatic, and the rejected lover may eventually kidnap his long-cherished lover, and then tearfully explain: "His rejection of me makes me want to love her even more." ”
Many psychologists try to explain this phenomenon, but it's hard because people always find ways to avoid people who will make them feel bad. The principle of "performance" can provide a reasonable explanation for this phenomenon.
When people can't do what they want to do, they become frustrated and angry. When people happen to be in love, they misinterpret depressed psychological signals as evidence of love.
Therefore, the more they are rejected, the more they become attached to those who cannot get it, and the positive energy of mutual attraction is aroused.
This theory also explains the strange effect of the barrier of love on the human psyche. The Greek writer Vasilis Vasilix once wrote a story about two mysterious creatures: a fish with a bird in the upper half and a bird with a fish in the lower body. They were deeply in love, but one day the fish bird annoyed that they could never live together. However, birdfish saw the good side of this tricky situation and comforted the fish bird and said, "No, how lucky we are!" Then we will always love each other, because we will always be separated from each other. ”
Vasilix was not the first writer to argue that distance produces beauty. In Roman mythology, Piramus and Tisper were a couple, but their parents disagreed with them and tried to prevent the couple from meeting. They are trapped in different rooms in adjacent houses, pouring out their hearts through holes in the walls. Writer Edith Hamilton described this in his rendition of the story as: "However, love cannot be forbidden. The more you try to extinguish the flame of love, the greater the enthusiasm for love will rise. In Shakespeare's famous tragedy Romeo and Juliet, the more two rival families obstruct them from being together, the deeper the affection between them.
To explore whether the same strange phenomenon exists in real life, Richard Driscoll, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, tracks the lives of hundreds of couples over the course of a year, observing how much they love each other and how much their parents interfere with their feelings. The results showed that the more parents tried to interfere with and block a couple's feelings, the deeper the feelings between them. Driscoll called this phenomenon the "Romeo and Juliet" phenomenon as a tribute to Shakespeare's great plays.
Many traditional theories of love say: "Out of sight, out of mind." They believe that when a couple is separated, the interest between them will gradually disappear. However, the principle of "performance" explains this phenomenon effortlessly. The more they separate a couple, the more angry they become, and then they tend to misinterpret their frustrations as signs of love.
The principle of "performance" also explains the phenomenon that when a relationship ends, people tend to feel very anxious. If they meet a new person soon after ending their last relationship, they will mistake anxiety for a sign of love. This phenomenon has been proved experimentally. In one experiment, some men took a personality test first and got either positive feedback (to make them feel good) or negative feedback (to make them feel anxious). The experimenters then let them go to the cafeteria, where they would meet an attractive woman.
As Shacklet expected, people who had just received negative feedback found the woman particularly attractive.
"Stockholm syndrome" also confirms Schackett's extension of the theory of "performance".
When people are unfortunate enough to be captured, they tend to develop a special affection for the hijackers. This symptom is fairly common, and according to the US FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) hostage database system, almost one-third of the hostages have this symptom. Interestingly, this situation only occurs when the hijacker shows a certain degree of kindness towards the hostage. So this may be precisely because the hostages misinterpreted their anxiety about being deprived of their freedom as a sign of liking. Again, it could explain why people feel dependent on abusive partners.
For years, psychologists believed that people's emotions affected their physical performance: when they felt angry they beat faster, when they felt anxious they sweated. Just as research on James' theory proves that people's actions trigger emotions, Schackett's research proves that people's interpretations of how they feel physically determine their emotions. According to this, the beating heart can be seen as a sign of anger, happiness, and love. Guided by Schackett's theory, people can create love by watching comic films, walking across dangerous bridges, and riding terrifying roller coasters. This theory also explains many strange aspects of love: why rejection triggers stronger emotions, why trying to break up a couple can actually deepen their feelings, and why it is difficult for people to leave partners who are obviously very bad for them.
Inspired by Schackett's research, researchers began to use the principle of "performance" to study other aspects of love.
3. The Attracting Energy of Love At the end of the nineteenth century, the unusual scientist Francis Galton devoted his life to the study of strange psychological phenomena. He always insisted on his philosophy: "If you can, just calculate!" He measured how restless his audience was to see if his colleagues' classes were boring, measured the average life expectancy of pastors to test whether prayers were fulfilled, and spent months trying to brew a perfect cup of tea.
In an article called "Measuring Personality," Galton argues that people can be counted by how much they love each other by "leaning" in dating. He noticed that when lovers sat together and ate, they would unconsciously lean toward each other, thus pressing more body weight on the front legs of the chair. Galton then suggested that a "pressure measuring instrument with a scale and a clock face" be installed on the front legs of everyday furniture such as chairs, so as to objectively measure the degree of love. Galton concludes the article by saying, "I did some basic experiments on this, but because I had to work on other problems, I didn't continue the experiment as I had expected." Unfortunately, Victorian scientists were reluctant to improve furniture based on Galton's suggestions, and his idea of measuring the level of love between lovers was gradually forgotten.
In fact, it wasn't until the 1970s that someone retryed recording the behavior of people in love. But instead of adopting Galton's ideas, they adopted observation. For several years, a group of enthusiastic experimenters ventured to bars and parties that psychologists had rarely touched before.
There, they secretly observe the performance between lovers. Observations confirm what people think:
Those who are deeply in love will unconsciously lean their bodies toward each other, look into each other's eyes for a long time, flirt under the table, imitate each other's body language, touch each other's hands and arms, and share their secrets.
The experimenters, inspired by the use of the "performance" principle to create happiness in previous experiments, wanted to know whether people would actually fall in love if they were acting as if they were in love.
The first experiment was done by Kenneth Gegen of Swarthmore College in the United States. Couples often spend wonderful time in the dark, so Gegen wanted to know what would happen if strangers were allowed to stay in the dark too. He first covered the floor and walls of a ten-foot square room with padding, and then had four men and four women spend an hour together in the room. After that, he turned off the lights again and let a group of similar experiment participants spend an hour in complete darkness inside the house.
Gegen used a regular camera and an infrared camera to record every move in the room, respectively, and interviewed each participant after the experiment. In an article titled "Mutation in the Dark," he noted that when the lights were on, no experiment participants deliberately touched or hugged other people, and only 30 percent felt sexual desire; however, when the lights were turned off in the room and fell into complete darkness, the situation changed — nearly 90 percent intentionally touched someone, 50 percent hugged each other, and 80 percent felt sexual desire. In addition, people in the dark are more willing to talk about important things in their lives and feel more attracted to each other. Gergen's footage shows even people touching each other's cheeks and starting to kiss each other. When people are in a situation that only couples can find, they quickly act as if they have also been shot by the arrow of Eros, driving the positive energy of love and then thinking that they are more attractive to each other.
This experiment is just the tip of the iceberg of many laboratory experiments that have created love since then.
Harvard psychologist Daniel Wigner wanted to know whether, just as smiling makes people happy, having two strangers touch their feet and flirt makes them feel more attractive. Wegener noted that previous experimenters in experiments that proved the hypothesis that "smiling makes people happy" often made up a reason to prevent experiment participants from being affected by the experiment itself, giving only the results that the experimenters wanted to hear. So he pretended that the purpose of the experiment was to study the psychology of card players.
Volunteers come to the lab in groups of four. The four of them did not know each other, including two men and two women. The experimenters then divided them into two groups for a poker match, each consisting of a man and a woman.
After that, the experimenters took the two groups of experiment participants to two different rooms and explained the rules of the game to them. In fact, the experimenters had one of the groups cheat by using codes in the game. How do I pass a secret code? The cheating group constantly bumps into each other's feet during the game, passing information on to each other.
In fact, it's about getting them to flirt without their knowledge. After the competition, all four participants were assigned a rating for the others' attractiveness index. The group of men and women who acted as if they loved each other thought they were more attractive to each other.
Wigener isn't the only one trying to create love in the lab. In 2004, psychologists Arthur Alan and Barbara Frely from the State University of New York at Stony Brook University Town conducted an equally bizarre but equally insightful experiment, but the props they used were eye masks and a pack of straws.
Young couples are always very happy together, so the experimenters wanted to know whether encouraging people to spend wonderful time together would bring their hearts closer to each other. To find answers to their questions, they invited participants to the lab, randomly paired them, and then divided them into two groups.
In one group, each pair of experiment participants had a wonderful time. The experimenter blindfolded one of them with an eye mask, then asked the other to take a straw and let them bite each end of the straw. Next, the experimenter asked the person with the straw to read aloud the instructions for a dance step, and the other blindfolded person to learn that dance step. After that, the experimenter removed the blindfold and straw, gave one of them a pen and paper, and gave the other the name of some simple object (such as a tree, house, etc.). One of them cannot name these objects and can only describe their characteristics as much as possible; the other person tries to draw the object. In the other group, each pair of experimenters did not have eye masks and straws, but just learned to dance steps and draw with their faces.
At the end of the game, all participants drew two overlapping circles to indicate how close they felt to their companions. The results showed that participants in the experiment who acted like happy couples felt much more intimate with each other.
Over the years, experimenters have conducted many similar studies. In some experiments, experimenters pretended to study superpowers and therefore had participants look at each other; in others, they encouraged complete strangers to share their biggest secrets with each other. Time and time again, experimenters have discovered that the positive energy of love can actually be created.
The positive energy of love can be created to be inspired by the results of the above experiments, and the American psychologist Robert Epstein decided to go a step further and investigate whether it is possible to use these methods to create love outside the laboratory.
Epstein has a rich career experience. When he was less than twenty years old, he felt his mission was to become a rabbi, so he sold all his possessions and went to Israel. Six months later, he found out that it was not his real mission and returned to the United States, determined to "make a great and lasting contribution to humanity as a whole." He became interested in psychology and eventually came to Harvard as an undergraduate. He published 21 papers in four years, so the head of Harvard's psychology department approved that he did not have to write his graduation thesis and encouraged him to "bind his published articles into a book and publish as many articles as possible." A few years later, Epstein became editor-in-chief of the prestigious magazine Psychology Today. In 2003, he left the magazine to conduct many studies on topics such as creativity, stress, and adolescence. Of course, he also studied the subject of "love".
Epstein argues that contemporary Westerners' notions of love are badly influenced by fairy tales, romance novels, and Hollywood blockbusters. When people were very young, they read stories in which the unfortunate heroine was always taken away from the sea of misery by knights in shining armor, and love was portrayed as a mysterious emotion triggered by magical kisses, magical potions, and the will of the gods. When they grow up, in the books they read or the movies they watch, people are constantly looking for the love of life; if they find it, they will live happily ever after. Epstein believed that these misconceptions about love seeped into our minds and had a devastating effect on our lives.
He believes that love is not a magical process, and people are not destined to be with a certain person. Instead, he believed that love developed according to existing psychological principles. If you show love for each other, any two people are likely to love each other. It can be seen that the positive energy of love can be created.
This idea may sound strange, but there is evidence that it may be correct.
Many celebrities have bonded because of drama. A famous example is that after starring in the movie Cleopatra, Richard Burton fell deeply in love with Elizabeth Taylor. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie played a couple in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and then developed feelings outside the scene.
In the film The Pride, Warren Beatty plays the robber Benjamin Bugsy Siegel, who falls in love with the Hollywood rising star played by Annette Bening at first sight. Outside the scene, Beatty and Benin entered the marriage hall soon after filming. These celebrities played the role of lovers in the film and quickly became acquainted outside the scene.