For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about love scholars.
As a scholar of love, University of North Carolina social psychologist Sara Algoe studies the links between emotions, relationships and health to understand what makes for high-quality romantic bonds. As she studies the nature of love, she’s also become something of a matchmaker in her field, working to connect sociologists, psychologists, and other scientists who study love. Algoe believes that it’s essential to share their approaches, insights, and data in order to help increase our understanding of what love is and how it works.
Currently, researchers working on love tend to approach their questions through one of two methodological lenses: relationship science focuses on the couple, while affective science focuses mainly on the emotional experiences of the individual. Algoe’s own early background was in the latter area. “My research has been coming to love because of the behaviors that I see in people and how they enact love toward other people,” she says. “But we haven’t really tapped into the rich methodology that comes from relationship science.” Similarly, “there’s all this work in relationships research studying people who are in romantic relationships, but it doesn’t necessarily draw on the really rich theory that comes from affective science.” Like a good romantic comedy scriptwriter, Algoe reached a simple realization: “it really seems like it is time to get the two groups to start talking to each other.”