Psychology project Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words

Psychology project - Essay Example Sternberg goes on to elaborate that compassionate love consists of liking without sexual desire. He traces compassionate love to humanities biological heritage. The extreme helplessness of a human infant who cannot even hold his/her head upright for the first five months and needs the support of an elder care giver who nurtures his life guided primarily with the feelings of compassionate love for the completely vulnerable and helpless organism that man is at birth. So the perpetuation of the species to a large extent is dependent on the compassion and care our older care givers gave us to enable us to survive. Sternberg states that compassionate love results from both intimacy and commitment - (minus the passion). Compassion is an unconditional love rather like the love God has for humanity or like the brotherly/sisterly love shared by homeless people who share a deeper caring for each other even though they are not related. By its very definition compassionate love in my view is important as it will act as an anti-dote to fight terrorism and the senseless hatred of people who are different. More then any other kind of love, compassion is the one type of love that will facilitate a perpetuation of the species because, the more compassion we have for each other, the less likely we are to bump each other off. Robert Sternberg's triangular theory of love states love has three components- 1) Intimacy 2) Passion 3) Commitment. Various combinations of these result in different types of love. For example, a combination of intimacy and commitment results in compassionate love. According to Sternberg compassion is a more durable form of love as it is based on the two elements of commitment as well as intimacy, while love that is based on a single element, like say, passion is more likely to fizzle out with time. In this paper we will examine various theories on love to try and better understand the nature of love in general and compassionate love in particular. Biology of Psychology Here is the idea- 'Natural selection' offers the advantage of survival and so is more likely to be practiced by future generations. Darwin states, "can we doubtthat individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others,would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favorable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection."(Darwin, 1859, Natural Selection, The Origin of Species,) It could be that when we fall in love