Love Hurts (Other People), written by Stephanie Pappas,
reminds me of the Grant study. The Grant study, published in the Atlantic and
written by Joshua Wolf Shenk, explains the scientific research study done by
Harvard researchers that followed 268 men and chronicled their levels of
happiness throughout the years. What the study found is that love truly effects
how we develop as adults. One case explains how one of the test subjects was
forced to eat alone for six years; this Grant study man later developed
psychiatric problems. Love Hurts, like
the Grant study, is based on a trio of studies which took 130 people who are in
serious relationships and eventually showed that when they are in a long term
relationship their brains will do what it needs to “protect” the relationship,
even if that means putting down potential threats. This directly relates to the
Grant Study man’s brain becoming psychotic to make up for the lack of love from
his family as he was forced to eat alone. The first study of the trio, at Florida
university the test subjects were asked to fill out questions to see their
level of jealousy, much like the Grant study where the Grant men were asked to
fill out questionnaires and send them back based on their level of happiness.
One of the big focuses in Love Hurts is jealousy; throughout the studies the
researchers found people with higher jealousy would respond more harshly to
pictures of potential threats to their relationships, so the researchers
decided to see if low jealousy people were different than the jealous types.
They designed a test in which the couples would separately be shown profiles of
people of their same sex in their area who were signing up for a dating site,
these profiles were made to be a threatening as possible to the peoples
relationships and what the results proved was that even low jealously people
still rated their potential threats as unattractive. Both The Grant Study and Love Hurts had very
different results than were expected when the studies began. Like the Grant
Study, Love hurts is similar because both are scientific experiments that
showed that our brains will automatically adapt to the situations we are in, in
order to cope with the possible threat or situation we are in.
The Grant Study men and the people that were tested in Love Hurts are examples of how people adapted to life and different situations. The men that were researched upon in the Grant Study all adapted differently. Some of them started with a good life and then started to slowly become depressed, and the others began with a troubled life and became successful. The research indicated that not everyone is strong enough to adapt to life and problems that we face. In Love Hurts researchers found that people that see a person of the same sex as a threat will unkindly start bombing the "threat" with brutal language trying to bring their value down. While the Grant Study was different life scenarios and a mixture of situations, Love Hurts seemed to aim more in love and how jealousy is the dark side of love. What Makes Us Happy is more about life in general though it does include some love-life problems.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that the two articles, "What Makes Us Happy?" by Joshua Wolf Shenk and "Love Hurts (Other people), New Study Finds" by Stephanie Pappas, are similar. The two article are alike in many ways by the studies and researches they show through the text as you stated. for example, in "Love Hurts" the author states "In a trio of studies involving 130 people in long-term relationships..." This describes that they did a study involving long-term relationships and it uses specific numbers to find a variety of examples. In this study they were looking into long- term relationships having a negative perspective on other attractive people just because they are with someone else.In the article "What Makes Us Happy" they describe the effect of a study that is long-term and it also uses in that study relationships with others as a major factor in living a healthy long life. In the study they were aiming to see "Is there a formula...for a good life?" By interviewing men that they expected to have good lives.Also he uses a specified number of people for the research and amount of time " For 2 years, researchers at Harvard Have been examining this question, following 268 men..." This shows the men were counted and studied,as so were the couples of the study mentioned in “Love Hurts” I agree with her because these are both researches on people based on emotions and relationships with others. In my opinion these studies are on things you can not factually prove, and they ultimately can never be scientifically true or fact.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that Love Hurts (Other People), and the Grant study are pretty similar in the sense that they both test how love affects the brain over time. The 268 men from the Grant study however, were observed for a lot longer with how their long term relationships and families affected them. The 130 people surveyed in Love Hurts were shown a series of images of the same sex that looked significantly better than themselves and were asked to judge them. Of course just about all of them rated them lower and even made rude comments about others because their mind set up a defense mechanism to try and make others appear them as they do. Because, the brain tells them that those better looking people may pose a threat to their relationship if they do not do something about it. The study was the same in both low jealousy people and high jealousy people, they were equally as rude and degrading to the images. That’s the type of thing that love can make a person do though, it is a very strong emotion that can make someone do just about anything for it.
ReplyDeleteI agree, I see the strong correlation between Stephanie Pappas' article "Love Hurts (Other People)" and Joshua Shenk's "What Makes Us Happy?", both argue that the mind has natural reactions that if left uncontrolled can cause unhappiness or maybe even hurt someone. Shenk's story covered the work of George Vailant, who had a psychoanalytic study over 268 men; he studied everything about these men in order to try to find the answer to happiness. He discovered that a persons ability to control their "adaptations" (or Defense Mechanisms) -which are our natural reactions to pain, conflict, and uncertainty- was directly related to their claims of how happy they were. In "Love Hurts (Other People)" Pappas talks about a study done on 130 people in long-term relationships, already mirroring the massive study in Shenk's article, where they eventually found that everyone gets jealous and lashes out to try and protect the relationship that they hold so dearly to their heart. This is clearly an adaptation to uncertainty, just as Shenk mentioned on Vailant's work.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with you that the two articles, “Love Hurts (Other People), New Study Finds” by Stephanie Pappas and “What Makes Us Happy?” by Joshua Wolf Shenk are similar in many ways. First of all both of the articles are about research conducted on students that attend universities although in different locations—Florida and Harvard. In Pappas’ article the study involves “130 people in long-term relationships.” This study was about finding out whether people in love have a negative outlook towards members of their own sex because they see them as a threat. When tested for jealously the study found that “the love’s dark side kicked in without help,” suggesting that the threat of losing the partner was too strong for any other element to come in and affect jealousy. In Shenk’s article the study involves research done by George Valliant over “268 men examined for 72 years.” This study was clearly a very long-term study done when compared to the one described in Pappas’ article. It was trying to find out whether there is a “specific formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaption for a good life.” Towards the end of this study it seemed as though the students with the perfect lives had now a chaotic one and the ones that began with chaotic lives now had settled in and a perfect life. Both of these studies dealt with the brain and its reaction to the environmental factors surrounding the person to either live a happy life or to see a member of the same sex as a threat to the potential long-term relationship with their partner. These studies helped portray how even the way that you live your life affect not only you but also the people around you many times the innocent ones.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with you that the Grant study and "Loves Hurts (Other People)" are similar. The two studies are completely different in the way they are conducted, their purpose and the way the conclusion is drawn. Both studies have a large sample group but the way information is gathered is completely different. For example the Grant study uses surveys and interviews to keep up with the sample group and "Love Hurts" uses peoples reactions to pictures. The Grant study is conducted with high levels organization of files and "Love Hurts" is inaccurate because of scientist viewing people reactions to photos. This is extremely biased because each scientist can interpret the peoples reactions to the picture differently. The purpose of the Grant study was to find out what is happiness and the "Love Hurts" study just measures jealousy. The grant study explained causes of happiness or unhappiness and gives us a specific reason why people are either happy or unhappy. The "Love Hurts" study just involved couple who were in a long term relationship and only gives one reason for jealousy, the fact that we see same sex people as a threat to our relationships. The conclusion drawn by the Grant study explains how a number of factors go into happiness like relationships and health but the only conclusion from the "Love Hurts" study is that jealousy is caused by threat within our own sex.
ReplyDelete