Commentary on how pop psychology presents relationships

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Recommended: relationship media and society

The media today publishes many articles on relationships. These are often presented as advice columns or news articles and many of the writers will usually include some sort of psuedo-psychology to back up their claims. This may look good from the readers’ perspective as it attempts to provide some scientific grounding for the basis of the article; most of the time however, the ‘psychology’ presented is either misinterpreted, based on poor research, or just completely false. In this paper I will use examples of relationship psychology found in popular media and will compare them to accepted psychological theory.
Appendix I shows an article published by the Daily Mail talking about a new phenomenom called ‘love addiction’ and uses quotes from “Pia Mellody, senior clinical adviser at The Meadows treatment centre in Arizona” and “psychotherapist Maureen Courtney” to create and argument from authority. The article makes several claims; the first is that love addiction actually exists as a condition and it also contains a quote from Maureen Courtney to suggest that love addiction has roots in how attachments were formed during childhood. Research has been conducted into whether love is an addictive disorder and the results have been mixed. Reynaud and Karila et al published a journal article in 2010 which found that there are currently inefficient data to be able to classify love addictiction as a clinical disorder. Within this study however they found that in some extreme cases, people suffering from love addiciton would exhibit symptoms similar to that of a drug addiction (eg. Intoxication and withdrawal symptoms). A journal article written by Sussman in 2010 defines love addiction and outlines possible treatments; this suggests that...

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... A., Luminet, O., Rim'E, B., Gross, J. J., De Timary, P. & Mikolajczak, M. (2013). Oxytocin increases willingness to socially share one's emotions. International Journal Of Psychology, 48 (4), pp. 676--681.
Macbeth, L. (2014). Should sex be a dealbreaker?. [online] Retrieved from: http://www.cosmopolitan.co.uk/love-sex/sex-blog/should-sex-be-a-dealbreaker-in-a-relationship [Accessed: 23 Feb 2014].
Reynaud, M., Karila, L., Blecha, L. & Benyamina, A. (2010). Is love passion an addictive disorder?.The American Journal Of Drug And Alcohol Abuse, 36 (5), pp. 261--267.
Sussman, S. (2010). Love addiction: definition, etiology, treatment. Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity, 17 (1), pp. 31--45.
Willoughby, B. J., Carroll, J. S. & Busby, D. M. (2014). Differing relationship outcomes when sex happens before, on, or after first dates. Journal Of Sex Research, 51 (1), pp. 52--61.

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