Falling in love is one of the most complex and overwhelming feelings a human being can experience. The dynamics of "being in love" are complex and multifaceted. While a full review of the nuances of such pairings is beyond the scope of this paper, my purpose here is to highlight some of the basic processes and communication behaviors relevant to falling in love, dating and romantic relationships. (Samp, J., & Palevitz, C, 2009).
It is common to try to organize various psychological topics by placing the factors involved into environmental and physiological categories. For example, you would place hormones, a known component of physical and sexual attraction, into the physiological category. However, "where would you place something like desire for physical pleasure, a frequently cited element in sexual motivation? " (Abramson & Pinkerton, 1995; Cofer, 1972; Hatfield & Rapson, 1993). .
Falling in love has both a physiological component - the physical sensations associated with touch - and a subjective psychological component. But where does an emotion and physical response of falling in love, fit into physiological and environmental components? .
Falling in Love is an emotion (Cofer, 1972), which, according to the Schacter-Singer theory, is a subjective feeling based upon physiological arousal and interpretations of the stimuli that are linked to the arousal (Cornelius, 1996). Thus emotions are both physiologically- and cognitively-based.
Recent research has focused on the use of affect or emotion as heuristics that have a strong influence on a variety of decision making contexts (Damasio, 1994; Finucane, Peters, & Slovic, 2003; Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 2001; Mellers, 2000), where the emotion we most closely associate with the context of choosing a mate is the emotion of love. This indicates that another category exists into which we might place falling in love, but to state this would be to miss the larger issue.
