ICDS News

ICDS co-hire’s study focuses on how we can cultivate more love

Editor’s Note: A version of this story was published in Penn State News.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Zita Oravecz, Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) and associate professor of human development and family studies, recently talked with Penn State News about her research based on love which is supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

Oravecz has published nearly 10 papers based on this research focus.

“The concept of love is much broader than what people might immediately think. The first thing we tend to think of is romantic love, but there are so many other expressions of love. There are many small gestures and behaviors that generate the same feelings of warmth and kindness — the kind of love you experience through friendship, from your family or even love that you might receive from strangers,” Oravecz said.

In her research, Oravecz and her collaborators define love as doing something nice for someone else and showing care for their well-being without expecting something in return. This can, of course, occur in romantic love, but there are various scenarios in which this is played out in non-romantic contexts.

Oravecz strives to capture all experiences of love in everyday life in her studies.

The researchers have previously identified several scenarios that people in the United States agreed made them feel loved. For example, those scenarios include when one receives a compliment from a stranger, spending quality time with someone, cuddling a child or receiving compassion during difficult times.

In a more recent project, the researchers explored a connection between our expressions and feelings of love where their early results suggest that the more we express love, the more we feel loved.

“I think this speaks to our human willingness and eagerness to feel love. When people are open and ready to express love, they might also be more open and ready to receive it. This preliminary finding could also mean that people who express more love are generally more aware of the signs and expressions of love in everyday life, so they are more attuned to when they are experiencing love,” Oravecz said.

The team developed mathematical models to capture love dynamics and found that those who more freely express love experienced feelings of being loved for longer before returning back to a normal emotional baseline. The researchers call this “love inertia.”

“Higher love inertia means that the level of loving feelings was maintained longer and changed more slowly, while people who had lower love inertia returned to a normal emotional baseline more quickly. People who experienced higher inertia in their feelings of being loved had better mental health and well-being indicators. This lines up with established research that found social support and caring — as compared to loneliness and isolation — are very beneficial for our psychological well-being,” Oravecz said.

Oravecz has also found through her research that people that had higher levels of feeling loved were associated with greater psychological well-being.

“We often think in terms of partners and family, but the more I have dug into the research, the more I’ve realized that even small moments in daily life — when a neighbor does something kind like bringing in your garbage can or a colleague invites you for lunch and asks how you are doing — these moments are just as important, and they can create the same warm, caring, loving feelings that romantic and familial love can,” Oravecz said.

The team has started to explore cultural differences in everyday experiences of love in a study that spans six countries around the world, aiming to further contribute to raising awareness of global experiences of love.

“If we practice consciously looking for expressions of love, we’ll see them everywhere. Hopefully as we become more aware of daily gestures of love, it will motivate us to open up and express our own love even more. It’s a habit, just like anything else: the more you do it, the more you will get better at it,” Oravecz said.

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