Poets and songwriters tend to focus their artistry on passion and romance, but it may be those unsung, brief feelings of love during the day linked to psychological well-being, according to a new researcher.
In two studies, the researchers found that people who experienced higher "felt love" — brief experiences of love and connection in everyday life — also had significantly higher levels of psychological well-being, with feelings of purposefulness and optimism, compared to those who had lower scores of had felt love. They also found that people with higher felt love scores tended to have higher extraversion personality scores, while people with lower felt love scores were more likely to show signs of neuroticism.
According to the researchers, the baseline of the subjects' felt love experiences increased overall throughout the study, suggesting that the nudges to recognize examples of love and closeness during the study may also have gradually increased the subjects' overall sense of love. Stronger experiences of felt love are in turn associated with improvements in psychological well-being.
"It's something that we've seen in the literature on mindfulness, when people are reminded to focus on positive things, their overall awareness of those positive things starts to rise," the researcher said. Likewise, by only paying attention to those daily moments of felt love, we can also increase our awareness of the overall positive aspects of love in our daily lives. This effect replicates in both studies, implying that awareness of felt love in everyday life may itself be an intervention that increases levels of felt love over a longer period of time.”
