Why We Love

950 Words2 Pages

Webster’s dictionary defines love as “affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.” Wikipedia, however, defines love as “an emotion of strong fondness and personal attachment. In philosophical context, love is a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection.” Who’s right? Love is an abstract noun, meaning that there is no concrete form of love. Therefore, who’s to say who’s right or wrong? Love can only be defined by the people who claim to fall into it. But, researchers can investigate the reasons behind it. Most aspects, such as physical appearances and animal instinct, can be explained by the chemistry of the human body, but aphrodisiacs are another story altogether.

Anyone who has studied psychology has heard Sigmund Freud’s theory that all girls fall in love with their daddies and all boys fall in love with their mommies. Although most would automatically disagree, cognitive psychologist David Perrett has a different opinion. He has developed new software that allows people’s faces to be morphed to his heart’s content. In one of his experiments, he morphed a subject’s face into that of the opposite sex and shuffled that picture in with a random selection of others. He then asked the subjects to identify which was most attractive to them. In every case, the subject would choose the morphed picture. Perrett theorizes that this is because people are most comfortable with faces and features that they have grown up around: their parent’s, sibling’s, and their own faces. (Perrett) Although, facial features are not the only elements in determining attractiveness and different people have different criteria for each aspect. There are aspects such as hair style or color, eye shape or color, ...

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