Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Experience and Expression of Love

Book excerpt: This ambitious volume integrates findings from various disciplines in a comprehensive description of the modern research on love and provides a systematic review of love experience and expression from cross-cultural perspective. It explores numerous interdisciplinary topics, bringing together research in biological and social sciences to explore love, probing the cross-cultural similarities and differences in the feelings, thoughts, and expressions of love. The book’s scope, which includes a review of major theories and key research instruments, provides a comprehensive background for any reader interested in developing an enlightened understanding of the cultural diversity in the concepts, experience, and expression of love. Included among the chapters: How do people in different cultures conceptualize love? How similar and different are the experiences and expressions of love across cultures? What are the cultural factors affecting the experience and expression of love? Cross-cultural understanding of love as passion, joy, commitment, union, respect, submission, intimacy, dependency, and more. A review of the past and looking into the future of cross-cultural love research. Critical reading for our global age, Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Experience and Expression of Love promotes a thorough understanding of cross-cultural similarities and differences in love, and in so doing is valuable not only for love scholars, emotion researchers, and social psychologists, but also for practitioners and clinicians working with multicultural couples and families. “The most striking feature of this book is the broad array of perspectives that is covered. Love is portrayed as a universally found emotion with biological underpinnings. The text expands from this core, incorporating a wide range of manifestations of love: passion, admiration of and submission to a partner, gift giving and benevolence, attachment and trust, etc. Information on each topic comes from a variety of sources, cross-culturally and interdisciplinary. The text is integrative with a focus on informational value of ideas and findings. If you take an interest in how love in its broadest sense is experienced and expressed, you will find this to be a very rich text.” Ype H. Poortinga, Tilburg University, The Netherlands & Catholic University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium “In this wide-ranging book, Victor Karandashev expertly guides us through the dazzling complexity of our concept and experience of love. Not only does he show the many different ingredients that make up our conceptions of love in particular cultures, such as idealization of the beloved, commitment, union, intimacy, friendship, and others, he draws our attention to the bewildering array of differences between their applications in different cultural contexts, or to their presence or absence in a culture. In reading the book, we also get as a bonus an idea of how an elusive concept such as love can be scientifically studied by a variety of methodologies – all to our benefit. A masterful accomplishment.” Kövecses Zoltán, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary “Long considered a research purview of only a portion of the world’s cultures, we know today that love is universal albeit with many cultural differences in meaning, form, and expression. Moreover, love has a rich history of scholarship across multiple disciplines. Within this backdrop, Karandashev has compiled a remarkably comprehensive global review of how people experience and express their emotions in love. Covering the topic from a truly international and interdisciplinary perspective, this book is an indispensable source of knowledge about cultural and cross-cultural studies conducted in recent decades and is a must read for anyone interested in the universal and culturally diverse aspects of love.” David Matsumoto, San Francisco State University, Director of SFSU’s Culture and Emotion Research Laboratory