SUMMARY OF THE JOURNAL
HOW LOVE AND LUST CHANGE PEOPLE’S PERCEPTION OF RELATIONSHIP PARTNERS?
Introduction
This journal is about partner evaluation and suggests that love and lust different with respect to temporal perspective and, consequently, affect processing styles differentially. From social cognition research it is known that when people frequently and consistently experience certain ways of thinking in certain situations, reminders of these situations are sufficient to trigger those procedure. Because of a strong association between a long-term perspective and the concept of love, subtle reminders of love should habitually engender a global way of processing information, whereas subtle cues of lust, should automatically initiate a local way of processing.
A questionnaire was given to participants in whom they were asked to evaluate their partners on several independent dimensions. They expected less (more) differentiation among dimensions when primed with love (lust). They assume this effect to be mediated by global versus local processing as measured by the Navon letter task. They included a friendship priming group in Study 1, and a happiness priming group in Study 2. Whereas friendships are related to long term goals, happiness is usually perceived as a short lived state. We expected that friendship primes would lead to effects similar to love while happiness primes would lead to effects more similar to lust. In Study 1 we also assessed temporal distance of imagined thoughts and predicted this to be a mediator of the relation between love/lust, global/local processing and halo.
The objective
To prime situations of love, lust, and friendship or happiness supraliminal (via imagination instructions, Study 1) or subliminally (by priming concepts, Study 2) and compared those to a non-primed control group. Both an undergraduate sample and an elderly sample, provided that both older and younger generations associate love more than