What attracts us to a romantic relationship; Is it how that relationship makes us feel, or is it the attraction of the other party? An individual with emophilia’s answer to this question will be what romantic relationships make them feel.
Psychologist Daniel N. Jones and social psychologist Shelby R. Curtis examined many concepts in 2017 while researching personality and individual differences. One of the concepts they examined was the concept of emophilia. “Why do people with emophilia fall in love easily, quickly, and often?” They tried to answer the question. As a result of their research, they found that emophilia may be caused by the reward mechanism in the brain. Another result of the study was that this problem was not related to attachment problems.
Emophilia: I can’t stop falling in love.
Emophilia, which corresponds to concepts such as sip love and ayran volunteer in society, expresses that people fall in love very often. According to Jones and Shelby, the main reason for switching partners so often is the reward mechanism in these people’s brains. The pleasure one gets when in love is a reward for the person and he tries to get it over and over again. Just like Skinner’s mice.
Psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner, in his experiments on operant conditioning, invented what is now called the Skinner Box. This box contains a button and a section where the bait drops when the button is pressed. The mouse presses the button continuously after realizing that the bait comes as you press the button. Just like emophilic individuals who fall in love all the time to get the pleasure they get when they fall in love.
In another study, it was found that it may be related to the personality traits we call the dark triad (narcissism, machiavellianism, psychopathy). People with these personality traits tend to hide their personalities.
You will often hear the following phrases from individuals with emophilia:
1. Falling in love is my job. There is hardly anyone else who falls in love as easily as I do.
2. Maybe my problem is that I get attached so quickly to the other person.
3. I think falling in love is the most beautiful feeling in the world.
4. Love is just for me. I wish I fell in love more often.
5. I may be jumping from relationship to relationship, but I can’t help it. I think this is the last time every time.
Note: Although it is written in some sources that falling in love easily and frequently, which means volunteering for buttermilk and being greedy, is due to the lack of parental love, but there is no scientific data on this.
Sources: 1, 2, 3