Word: psychologist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Today Michael and I are friends. On Christmas Eve, we gathered a group, and I made an enthusiastic attempt at the traditional Italian seven-fishes feast. I'm in better shape now than I was in high school, which fits with psychologist Bella DePaulo's finding (in her fascinating 2006 book on single life, Singled Out) that the period around divorce is associated with improvements in health. Divorced men are also, not surprisingly, happier than men stuck in bad marriages...
Martie Haselton, a psychologist at UCLA, is exploring the forces that may have shaped those more primal attributes into modern love. She believes it all comes down to the long-term health of children. Haselton calls romantic love a "commitment device," a mechanism that encourages two humans to form a lasting bond. Those bonds help ensure that children survive to reproductive age, getting fed and cared for by two parents rather than one. "Natural selection has built love to make us feel romantic," she says...
...Psychologist Arthur Aron of the State University of New York at Stony Brook says people who meet during a crisis-an emergency landing of their airplane, say-may be much more inclined to believe they've found the person meant for them. "It's not that we fall in love with such people because they're immensely attractive," he says. "It's that they seem immensely attractive because we've fallen in love with them...
...what happens when people meet and date under the regular influence of drugs or alcohol, only to sober up later and wonder what in the world they were thinking, that's because in both cases powerful chemistry is running the show. When hormones and natural opioids get activated, explains psychologist and sex researcher Jim Pfaus of Concordia University in Montreal, you start drawing connections to the person who was present when those good feelings were created. "You think someone made you feel good," Pfaus says, "but really it's your brain that made you feel good...
...comforting one too. Long for the heat of early love if you want, but you'd have to pay for it with the solidity you've built over the years. "You've got to make a transition to a stabler state," says Barry McCarthy, a psychologist and sex therapist based in Washington. If love can be mundane, that's because sometimes it's meant...