Cultural Consensus of Felt Love Experiences in Emerging Adulthood
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EMERGING ADULTS AND CONSENSUS ON LOVE 1 What Makes Emerging Adults Feel Loved? Cultural Consensus of Felt Love Experiences in Emerging Adulthood Olivia Ellis1, Saeideh Heshmati1, and Zita Oravecz2 1Department of Psychology, Claremont Graduate University 2Human Developmental and Family Studies, Pennsylvania State University This manuscript has been submitted to Applied Developmental Science. Author Note Olivia Ellis https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8621-9668 Saeideh Heshmati https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4002-128X We have no known conflict of interest to disclose. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Saeideh Heshmati, Division of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences, 175 E. 12th St., Claremont, CA 91711. Email: [email protected] EMERGING ADULTS AND CONSENSUS ON LOVE 2 Abstract The experience of love plays an integral role in human development as adolescents transition into young adulthood. However, little is known about whether emerging adults have a shared understanding about the indicators of love in daily life. Using Cultural Consensus Theory informed by developmental theory, this study examined whether emerging adults in the United States reach a consensus on what makes people feel loved. Emerging adults ages 18 to 22 responded to 60 items on everyday scenarios and decided whether they thought most people would think each scenario was loving or not. Bayesian cognitive psychometric analysis revealed that college-attending respondents converged on a shared belief on love, with most agreed upon scenarios centered on compassion, support, and acceptance. Moreover, we found that students with higher consciousnesses and extraversion scores were more knowledgeable about the consensus on felt love. We expand on the developmental implications of these findings. Keywords: Love, emerging adults, personality styles, early adulthood, Cultural Consensus Theory, Bayesian analysis EMERGING ADULTS AND CONSENSUS ON LOVE 3 What Makes Emerging Adults Feel Loved? Cultural Consensus of Felt Love Experiences in Emerging Adulthood The transitional period from adolescence to young adulthood – dubbed as “emerging adulthood” in industrialized countries (Arnett, 2004) – is characterized by a gradual shift of focus from the self to connection with others. Emerging adulthood is a critical period in which individuals form beliefs about love and intimacy (Erikson, 1950, 1959, 1968; Dunkel & Harbke, 2017). How emerging adults navigate these beliefs in this developmental stage can have long- term implications on their social relationships and well-being network (Erikson, 1950, 1968; Heshmati et al., 2020). However, research has shown that emerging adults in the United States often struggle to develop high-quality, long-term relationships characterized by trust and commitment—particularly with people outside of their immediate families (Noller et al., 2001; Reis et al., 2000). This can become especially detrimental for emerging adults who leave their home and immediate families for the first time to relocate to college where they face an abrupt decrease in institutional support and an increase in challenges when adapting to a new social environment (Schulenberg et al., 2004). In industrialized countries such as the United States, institutional support is even further relaxed for college-attending youth, leading youth to rely on their own abilities and skills to regulate their intimacy needs and create loving experiences in their day-to-day lives (Côté, 2000). Thus, in this stage of life, emerging adults begin to search for answers to questions such as “how can I feel more connected and loved?”, “how can I make others feel more loved?”, “what are the norms of the society that I live in about feelings of love?” These questions highlight the unique nature of the emerging adulthood stage in which identities are still developing while concerns about beliefs on love and intimacy arise (Montgomery, 2005). Therefore, a further examination of emerging adults’ beliefs on indicators EMERGING ADULTS AND CONSENSUS ON LOVE 4 of love in daily life and their view of social and cultural norms around love signals in both romantic and non-romantic settings is warranted. More specifically, due to the struggles college- attending emerging adults face in forming genuine connections (Arnett, 2007), the question arises as to whether this unique population of college-attending emerging adults have formed beliefs in regard to what makes people feel loved. Understanding beliefs on both romantic and non-romantic love is particularly relevant to college-attending emerging adults because although college can offer opportunities for socialization, many college students still suffer from loneliness. College-attending emerging adults spend a significant amount of time socializing and attending social events (~3.5 hours a day; Finlay, et al., 2012). With a wide variety of opportunities to socialize at their fingertips, college students have more options than ever. This abundance of activities and paths that they can self-select, while seemingly wonderful to provide in a college setting, can be debilitating for many (Schulenberg et al., 2004). These challenges associated with entering into a new environment can give rise to loneliness, a concept that can result in social and behavioral changes and that has also been associated with depressive symptoms, drug usage, and even suicidal tendencies (Lamis, et al., 2014). Suicide rates as high as 6-12% for this population call for a need to look at what can prevent the feeling of loneliness and promote more positive outcomes (Arria et al., 2009; Heshmati et al., 2017; Lamis, et al., 2014; Oravecz et al., 2020; Wilcox et al., 2010). Taking a positive psychosocial functioning approach (Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi, 2006), we can address the challenges of this unique population by promoting positive adjustment and optimal functioning. Thus, generating a deeper understanding about college-attending emerging adults’ beliefs about love can provide insight into what can prevent loneliness, something that can be very detrimental for this population. While love has been EMERGING ADULTS AND CONSENSUS ON LOVE 5 discussed as a positive outcome gained from developing optimally in this stage (Dunkel & Harbke, 2017), beliefs about love—in both romantic and non-romantic settings—in the emerging adult college student population have yet to be thoroughly investigated. In the current study, we investigated beliefs on love in emerging adults within a Cultural Consensus Theory (CCT; Batchelder & Romney, 1988; Romney & Batchelder, 1999) framework. Specifically, we explored whether college students (18-22 years old) in the United States agreed on what makes most people feel loved and what does not. The cognitive psychometric tools of CCT, implemented in a multilevel Bayesian statistical framework, allowed us to explore individual differences in emerging adults’ decision-making styles with respect to their judgments of what makes people feel loved. Namely, we studied how college students’ demographics and personality styles (based on the Big 5 Inventory) might be associated with their level of knowledge on the shared beliefs on love and whether they have a tendency to accept a situation as loving when they are uncertain. Scientific Conceptualizations of Love Love has been challenging for researchers to conceptualize. Much of the delay in research on love in recent years has been attributed to the word previously being used loosely in the English language (Berscheid & Meyers, 1996; Reis & Aron, 2008) and descriptions of love not having had much of a common vocabulary (Rubin, 1998). Not only is love used in common vernacular associated with family or a romantic partner, but it is also used to describe one’s feelings toward a favorite food, a deity, or pets (Reis & Aron, 2008). While research has approached love both in and out of the romantic context, there has been a call for more research understanding love in everyday life (Knox, 1970). EMERGING ADULTS AND CONSENSUS ON LOVE 6 The essentialist approach suggests love requires investing one’s time in the well-being of another (Davis & Todd, 1985). This tenet aligns with a more recently developed idea that love is a moment of positivity resonance in which two individuals share in mutual care/concern, positive emotion, and biobehavioral synchronicity (Fredrickson, 2016). In an attempt to further refine the conception of love, the prototype approach has allowed researchers to ask laypeople to describe features of love or a certain type of love in order to understand the phenomena in everyday life (Sternberg & Sternberg, 2019). From this perspective, laypeople identified companionate types of love (e.g., familial, friendship, parental) as a more representative conceptualization of love in everyday life compared to a passionate type of love (e.g., romantic, passionate, etc.; Fehr, 1998; Sternberg & Sternberg, 2019). Most recently, building on prior research on laypeople’s perception on love, Heshmati et al. (2019) introduced a new line of inquiry by examining beliefs on love in daily life in the Cultural Consensus Theory (CCT) framework (see, e.g., Romney et al., 1986; Batchelder et al., 2018). They focused on the beliefs of the general population (ages 18-93) in the United States. Results suggested this population shared an agreement on what everyday life scenarios were considered as loving and which ones were considered as non-loving. While these findings were informative in understanding