Cultural Consensus of Love Experiences
October 2018 – January 2020
While I acquired a considerable amount of experience that would have prepared me for graduate school when I graduated from undergrad in 2016, I made the decision to earn more work and life experience in order to solidify my research interests and long-term professional goals.
By October 2018, I reached out to my undergraduate mentors Drs Kristin Beals and Jessica Tessler to talk about my grad school plans. At the time they were working on a Felt Love study with their graduate students, and given my academic experience and interest in this topic, I volunteered to work on this project at the end of 2108.
The project was titled Cultural Consensus of Love Experiences and was supported by the Department of Psychology at CSU, Fullerton. The purpose of this research was to examine the cultural consensus of felt love experiences among men and women in the United States.
My time on this project was primarily spent on survey design & scale selection. The Felt Love Scale was fundamental to the survey that was eventually deployed, and assessed what makes individuals feel loved, and how individuals of varying sexual orientations and relationship styles confirm and/or deviate from the consensus.
My involvement on this project additionally included attending weekly research meetings, finalizing an Institutional Review Board (IRB) application, and helping with participant recruitment.
I collaborated with graduate students and faculty to design a final survey that included the following scales and items:
Cultural identity items were added to the survey to examine endorsement of traditional Western relationship ideology, practices, and/or romantic expectations among culturally diverse groups.
The Klein Sexual Orientation Grid was included to examine felt love among individuals of diverse sexual orientations.
Relationship style items were additionally added with the intention that we would sample both monogamous and non-monogamous individuals for this study. This was central to the study because of assumptions made about the felt love experiences between monogamous and consensually non-monogamous individuals. An overarching goal of this study was to narrow the gap between these groups, and to reduce social stigma by promoting equality for all relationship styles.
Compersion is defined as the feeling of joy one experiences when witnessing another’s joy. In a romantic context, compersion also refers to feeling of joy when one’s partner is happy with another partner. Compersion items were added to allow us to examine the relationships between trait jealously and compersion and additional variables under analysis.
