Love - learned or inherent?

In my recent discussion about the power of literature with my friends, we've stumbled onto a rather interesting topic that I would like to share with all of you, and more importantly, get some feedback and opinions that you might have about it.

The main topic is the following question, "are emotions learned, or inherent in the human being?" I'd like to bring this down even lower, and specifically talk about love.

At this moment, I wont argue for one or the other, but will throw out some ideas about it - mainly from a story telling perspective, this includes all forms such as novels, poetry, film, music, etc.

It has been said that we would not know we were in love if we had not read novels or been introduced to it in some other form of story telling. A story is a way of doing and showing things with words; it makes something take place in the real world: it can, for example, suggest methods of selfhood or ways of behaving that are then imitated in our real world. So, if we agree that stories “create” instead of “reveal” feelings and emotions, then love is learned and created by them. We need stories to “coach” us how to feel.

Think about it; I’m sure all of us have been introduced to stories and fairytales in our childhoods that showed love and other feelings. Would we know how to experience these feelings without stories? Would nurturing by our mothers and fathers be enough?

I think that we would know how to love even if you weren't read stories or see examples of it.
We have natural emotions(like being sad or glad), maybe we wouldn't know what the certain felling meant but we would have them regardless of knowing what it was.

>>We have natural emotions (like being sad or glad)<<

thats precisely it, why do you think these emotions are "natural"? Do you think that we are born with a lexicon of emotions and the ability to differentiate one from the other?

I think that we are born with these emotions, think babies do cry when the are sad(being general here) and glad. You don't teach a baby to laugh if you play let's say peek-a-boo they just enjoy it and respond with either fear or happyness.

yeah, I see what you're saying - but do you think love falls into the same category of emotions as being "sad or glad"?

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You don't teach a baby to laugh if you play let's say peek-a-boo they just enjoy it and respond with either fear or happyness.

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Dogs smile too - they don't learn that from stories.

Dogs also mimic humans though.

I've never had a human squeal upon seeing me and then hump my leg. Unless you count RoD.

I do think that love falls under that category. I would fight that we wouldn't know what it was if we hadn't been taught. But it is a natural emotion cause I believe if it was taught then we could love anybody that we wanted to cause we would learn how to make ourselfs love.

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Originally Posted by sean_mackrory

I've never had a human squeal upon seeing me and then hump my leg. Unless you count RoD.

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Humans are intelligent enough NOT to mimic dogs!

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Originally Posted by prog-bman

I do think that love falls under that category. I would fight that we wouldn't know what it was if we hadn't been taught. But it is a natural emotion cause I believe if it was taught then we could love anybody that we wanted to cause we would learn how to make ourselfs love.

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There is no learning involved with love, unless you're talking about abstract feelings about love, like sex. Love is a required feeling, it was probably developed while our evolution was going on, as we developed, most likely humans that loved survived better. Love is a tool to survive, and thus that's why everyone feels it (for their parents, for their friends, etc).

This reminds me of a famous Chomsky quotation from the 50s. Although I don't remember the exact deatils (or the exact quotation), it was something along these lines: BF Skinner proposed that language is learned through children being rewarded or punished based on their reaction to stimuli from their parents to develop a proper sense of language. Chomsky said something to the effect of, "I don't know about the practices of intellectual families, but the rest of us live in the real world."

I think there is a parallel to draw here. The idea that emotions are taught as opposed to innate assumes that everyone has a common cultural background (for the case of written/spoken/acted works). Now, there are those societies that have not had exposure to Western thought on emotions, and even societies that have relatively little connection to Western culture (I realize this is an ambiguous term -- I am meaning it to specify a class of cultural backgrounds rather than a single one), and you can look at whether or not they have emotions. I can't say I've specifically done research into this, but certainly I've seen the National Geographics where some member of the tribe/group dies, and the close family members cry... presumably this is an expression of the sadness emotion, and I'd guess that an analog holds for love as well.

Cheers

thanks Kleid-0 and Sean for such great contributions to the thread :rolleyes:


back on topic though; suppose that all emotions are indeed inherent, how would you associate these feelings with the world around you. How would you know that you are "in love"? I think this is where stories play a huge role in our development.

Kleid I know this is the GD but could you please post about the topic.

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Originally Posted by axon

Suppose that all emotions are indeed inherent, how would you associate these feelings with the world around you. How would you know that you are "in love"?

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You know when you're in love when you care for someone very well. In other words your body takes over your emotions for that person, and it's an autohappiness when you see him/her.

"in love" is like a gun, a person pulls the trigger, and it's a natural event. But after the pulling the trigger, it goes down hill from there, like a exponential function.

yes, its easy for you to explain that, as you have a notion about what "in love" means? Think about how you learned what it means and where it came from? Think about why you've used such analogies for being "in love," and then the decline (according to you) of love.

See, you just told me a story of the emotion we tend to call love...if I didn't know what it meant before, I would have a bit better understanding of it now.

While I'd agree with you that it is inherent (I'm not so sure about the exponential function hypothesis, though), I'm not sure that you've really made a case for it, Kleid.

While reactions can certainly be influenced by learning, I think that the basic reactions are inherent. As I mentioned earlier, we can probably find analogs to the various emotions we'd consider in other societies with whom we've had minimal contact. Additionally, it would be hard to account for the uniformity of emotional reactions* within a society, especially in children. Certainly some are exposed to many stories and tales early on, but many are not, yet they still seem to exhibit emotions to which they have not formally been introduced.

*The uniformity is, of course, not perfect, and there is obviously a rather large difference in the "implementation details".

Inherent, evolved to keep couples together for the benefit of their children, (without love, couples will constantly split as they find more attractive people who will take them on, that's bad for children)

Recognition of being in love is like recognition of other states, sad, happy, etc.

Let´s take a few unique examples.
There are the humans who grew up among animals or isolated in basements, and we know they end up mostly mimicking the behaviors they got to see. That does not excludes the possibiliy that wolf-boy had the biological feelings of love, jealously and such. I don´t know more of those cases in relation to love though.

There is anothere experiment done with just born geese. As soon as they came from their eggs, they started following the first thing they saw, a human, as if it was the mother.
Then, when they cast a shadow of a goose on the floor, they didn´t seen to respond to it. But when they cast the shadow of an eagle ( they had never seen a real one before ), they all started freaking out and running away.

So, much like all other animals, we could have instincts that could be completed by the enviroment and others that did not depend on it. Perhaps love could be one of the first, and that would explain why we feel attracted to people of the same sex or not, like animals also do.

But regardless, we are humans. I don´t believe there are any instincts that tell us what to do. If there are, what they do is tell us what is pleasure and what is not ( which could include love in some way ), and we have other brain functions that conflitct with those.
So when you have someone who rapes, it´s not that their genes or instincts told him to do so, it´s usually because he/she has a socialization where other people´s suffering is indifferent in that case.

The fact that we can completely change the object of our love ( look for different personalities and qualities ) shows that the object of love is not a natural scene from a love at first sight movie, but also does not excludes the possibility of love being a feeling/need like pleasure from food ( which by the way, your taste for food can completely change too ).

But then again, we have those people who literally crucifixe themselves to remember jesus, we have others who stay away from love ( priests, hermits ) and such, which contradicts some of our most basic feelings of pleasure and well being.

So is love an isntinct towards other or a capacity of feeling, like wanting food, drugs or scratching your back with a metal pole, which it´s act and way to be can change with social and individual regulations?
To me it seens love is the latter, it´s just a capacity of pleasure and that is what defines it, and love could be taken in any way because we are humans and our "instincts" are very mutable.

All that doesn´t asnwers if someone born with wolves willl show feelings of heavy attachment towards some creature , though, so uhm, I think we need to look on those cases >.o

I say it's both.

The case of a person growing up with wolves (or any other non-human of your choice) is an interesting case, but I don't think it'll give a complete answer. Someone who grows up in an environment devoid of humans will have a lot of differences. Behavior would be learned from the wolves, and as such, they would not develop normally. While I think that the basic instincts/emotions are there, given such an atypical environment, they would likely develop in very different ways (or so it seems to me, at least), perhaps failing to develop at all.

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Originally Posted by axon

The main topic is the following question, "are emotions learned, or inherent in the human being?"

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I once read somewhere that they are inherent and are like reflexes; immediate responses to certain situations that you have no or little control over.

The theory that we 'discover' love because it is introduced to us seems a bit impossible: the first one who introduced someone to love must have experienced it from someone else. Love can't be caused by reading books etc. because it needs to have started from somewhere (religious people may argue that God taught us love and he started it).

I suppose one needs to define exactly what one means by "love", i think that strong feelings of attachment for a mate/potential mate that go beyond pure physical attraction is rooted in genetics (behaviour demonstrating attachment for partners appears to extend across human culture and even into the animal kingdom), though the way in which love is expressed will presumeably be highly dependent on learned behaviour.

There has to be some inherent connection between sensory input and behaviour.

I cannot tell you why, but when I listen to certain pieces of music, there are a number of chord sequences, not all of them overly complex, that will always make me laugh, and there are a few that reliably have me choking back the tears. This was the case when I was a kid, I didn't understand music then, I do now, but it doesn't alter the effect.

Now, is that an emotional response or a wired input/output response?

Define emotion.

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Originally Posted by adrianxw

I cannot tell you why, but when I listen to certain pieces of music, there are a number of chord sequences, not all of them overly complex, that will always make me laugh, and there are a few that reliably have me choking back the tears. This was the case when I was a kid, I didn't understand music then, I do now, but it doesn't alter the effect.

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I have that too - also when the right drum break comes in at the right moment etc.

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Inherent, evolved to keep couples together for the benefit of their children

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you really think so? I'm not great in anthropology, but isn't the "couple" unit a relatively young idea [note the relatively). Also how does your argument account for homosexuality?

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Love can't be caused by reading books etc. because it needs to have started from somewhere (religious people may argue that God taught us love and he started it).

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OK, I actually think that it is a mixture of both, inherent and learned. We have inherent emotions from birth, such as love, joy, sadness, etc - but we need stories to "coach" us to understand all these complex emotions.

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I suppose one needs to define exactly what one means by "love", i think that strong feelings of attachment for a mate/potential mate that go beyond pure physical attraction is rooted in genetics (behaviour demonstrating attachment for partners appears to extend across human culture and even into the animal kingdom), though the way in which love is expressed will presumeably be highly dependent on learned behaviour.

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see, clyde, you're getting exactly at my point - your definiton of love is not inherent, is it? you had to learn it from somewhere - that emotion (which we define as love) had to be "coached" somehow, in order for you to obtain that deeper definition of the emotion itself.

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define emotion.

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I like dictionary.com's definition just fine, I think it fits our discussion perfectly: "A mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling: the emotions of joy, sorrow, reverence, hate, and love."

This would be a good topic to discuss with my philosophy professor, I'll send him an email and see if he'll join the board's discussion.

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Originally Posted by axon

OK, I actually think that it is a mixture of both, inherent and learned. We have inherent emotions from birth, such as love, joy, sadness, etc - but we need stories to "coach" us to understand all these complex emotions.

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I'm thinking that we're born with some sort of innate ability to "love," (ie, have strong emotions for a person) but that the world around us (literature, stories and movies, our parents, etc.) focuses and intensifies it into a single identifiable feeling: love, hate, disgust, sadness, etc.

There have been (or at the least there has been a single) psycho-social studies done of the facial reactions to certain emotions--such as happiness, sadness, frustration--in cultures across the world. The results were that most common facial expressions could be identified to the proper emotion in just about every culture. This, I think, underscores the idea that emotion and feelings are mostly innate.

If I can find the link to the study, I'll post it.

i haven't thought about this long enough to make a long in depth profound post. but the whole time i was reading i was thinking about how certain animals have been known to mourn their dead. elephants, dolphins, apes (there's more, and maybe the ones i listed are incorrect, but the fact is that there are animals that do). to me this certainly provides some evidence of "instinctual attachment".

on a side note: i just realized i named the 3 smartest animals (i think, in the top 10 anyway). coincidence?

You forgot the mice... After all, they built the world... :D
(Alright, sorry, I couldn't help myself. Now back to your regularly scheduled philosophizing.)

On a more relevant note, the research that Ken mentioned fits well with what I mentioned earlier, namely that if there is some sort of reaction that can in some manner be more or less uniformly identified across various cultures, then this points to the emotions be inherent.

Now, the cultural context seems that it should be a major determining factor in exactly how those emotions are carried out, and what is associated with them in one's mind. While the definition of emotion that axon provided mentions a response that develops through some non-conscious process, it does not in any way specify how the mind would consciously respond to either the stimulus eliciting the emotion (or what the stimulus is), or for that matter, the emotion itself, and this seems to leave a lot of room for the particular ideas associated with love, hate, etc to be based largely on cultural factors.

Love is completely natural, not learned. Let me explain why i feel this way. Earlier this week when lauryn had her accident, i felt a pool of emotions tword everyone and everything. I cried like a little baby for 3 1/2 days straight, and thinking about it makes me want to do it again.

How many stories of love in your childhood expressed of such a pain? Alot of them, but not enough to influence a mode of behavior imo. I also wrote her a poem, i have never wrote any poetry in my life, but it flowed out natural and without intent or thought.

Anyone who talked to me the other night, i think the only one from here was kermi, can tell you that no expressed pain that deep could be learned. Just natural, pure, straight emotion.

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you really think so? I'm not great in anthropology, but isn't the "couple" unit a relatively young idea [note the relatively). Also how does your argument account for homosexuality?

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Well presumeably couples have been around long enough (couples are an old idea, though I vaguely recall human society being thought to have gone through a period of non-coupleness) for evolutionary adaptation.

Homosexuality is unaffected, just because love may have evolved to help rear offspring (in a sense _everything_ evolves to help rear offspring) does not mean that once developed the machinary enabling love could not be pointed in another direction.

It (love evolving to keep couples together for the sake of the children) might turn out to be false but it seems a plausable explanation.

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see, clyde, you're getting exactly at my point - your definiton of love is not inherent, is it? you had to learn it from somewhere - that emotion (which we define as love) had to be "coached" somehow, in order for you to obtain that deeper definition of the emotion itself.

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I don't really have a definition of love in a subjective sense, just like i don't have definition of "red", it's simply something i experience.

In a more objective sense i can look at other humans/animals observe that they display certain behaviour and then attempt to derive an evolutionary explanation.

There is another experiment on humans that I recall from my sociology class. There is some chemical substance, after a couple are together ( I think after they have a child ) that lasts on the woman for 3 years or so, which is the time she most needs help from someone to bear and take care of the child. Usually that is the time couples claim they love each other, but are no longer passionate. I think the substance has to do with her smell, which brings to another point.

If love is inherit, what would be the object of our desire? Shouldn´t the smell on others be a major part of this? Or is it behaviors that make one better than others ( that´s certainly not it if you look how love relations are held ). From that, and giving the fact that we cover our smells these days, there is no much room for love than being an impulse strongly regulated by culture.

But, there is another experiment. Couples were separated and, the males I believe, had to live on a house using soaps and everything with no smell. After a few weeks, their clothes had nothing but their uncovered smell. So shirts from different men were given to wives, and by a large percentage they liked more the smell of their couples.
What that can tell us? We can perceive other´s real stench even while they bath in perfume? And if that is the case, the people on the experiment liked the smell because their genes tells them so, or because they love their couples for another reasons and thus their smell became something pleasant due to conditioning?

Or we have love genes that tells us to be in love with someone who acts like our parents? Perhaps adopted kids don´t love people like their foster parents ( which is what happens with most people, and that Psychoanalysis claims to be the result of childhood relation with parents regardless of cultures ).
There are many possibilities :confused:

The fact that we feel so miserable when someone doesn´t love us, is not necessarily a clue that love is more than just a means of pleasure. We humans are born with complete social interaction, what we actually lack is a sense of individuality that grows with time and that we mostly suck at it.
When you call your ex-girlfriend A LOT after she broke up with you, it´s usually our little psychosis talking. We have a problem understanding that what the other person feels is not what we feel.
And when we have a self steem shattered because whe don´t understand why someone we loves does not loves us back, it could be our lack of individuality working, and not the love impulse at work.

I think love, like all emotions, is inherent. You may learn to deny love for various reasons, or to interpret your feelings of love as feelings of something else (or the opposite, interpret feelings of lust as love because you think you should be in love with the guy you want to do those kinds of things with or you are a slut...). That doesn't change the emotion itself anymore than belief in who was at fault changes the fact that one car rearended another. They still wrecked, and you still feel that emotion called love.

We can read stories and see what others think love is, but haven't you ever watched a movie and thought, "Wow, they were lovers? You could have fooled me." We do learn to recognize things from stories, but if we have experienced them ourselves, the stories no longer teach us in that sense. Instead they become just stories, like "The boy who cried wolf." If you've never done it, that story may help you learn not to do it. If you've done it and been ignored in a time of real need because you "cried wolf", then that story is something you can identify with, but not really learn anything more from.

The fact that there are so many love stories is a testament to how complex love is, and how wonderful it is. Just like the boy who cried wolf, when you read a love story you may learn to try and find love in the same form, but if you have experienced love, then you would instead identify with that love, perhaps bringing up memories of your own love experiences. I don't believe you will experience love just because a situation meets the critera you read in a book, or even in a library of books. Instead, those stories may help you recognize that the feeling you are experiencing is in fact love.

Why do I think love (like other emotions) is inherent? I need look no further than my 2 year old son. No one has specifically taught him to love, but I know he feels the emotion even if he doesn't really understand it yet. He has learned, by watching us, that to express love one says it and hugs and/or kisses. When I come home from work, he will run up to me, hug my leg, and say "I luff yoo!" Sometimes out of the blue he will walk up to me and tell me he loves me and give me a kiss as he sees his parents do when we tell each other. Going back in time, he exhibited behavior that I would associate with love in different ways until he learned to imitate his parents and show it in this manner. The love was there however the whole time as part of his basic wiring.

Human beings rely on other human beings for survival, going back to early man.. we lived in groups, protected and provided for ourselfs and eachother.

The protectiveness we have for our 'loved' ones, family, friends and our partner must derrive from these early practices. As mentioned earlier in another post love is the key to survival in many ways.


Could the overwhelming 'true' love we feel for a person be because we sense a link with an early or even our first mate.... like when people in love have a 'connection' ?

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Could the overwhelming 'true' love we feel for a person be because we sense a link with an early or even our first mate.... like when people in love have a 'connection'

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I don´t think so, because the personality/qualities/whatever we love can completely change.

It's interesting that most people consider human love to be the most significant manifestation of the emotion when, in fact, love holds a central role in almost every aspect of life. The sky and the ocean, for instance, evoke just as powerful feelings of love in me as any person could. Now of course, love for a person has a much different quality than the love for a sunset, but they both nonetheless originate from the same basic principle. I think love manifests itself whenever we feel unity with something and then become attached to it, and if that's true then there are really two (opposite) principles at it's root (unity and attachment). To quote Lao Tsu: "Under heavan all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness". In other words, we love because we are afraid to lose something that we identify closely with.

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Now of course, love for a person has a much different quality than the love for a sunset, but they both nonetheless originate from the same basic principle

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Hmm, romantic love, love for ones family and perhaps love for ones friends seem quite similar, but love for a sunset? I would have thought there's something very different going on there, all involve attachment but in terms of how they feel subjectively, and their neurological and evolutionary basis i imagine there is a fairly large divide between the personal love we feel for people, and the somewhat abstract feelings we might have towards a sunset.

They are different kinds of love but that doesn't make one 'abstract' and the other 'real'. You love them for different reasons, but the loss of one can have just as much destructive potential as the other.

I have a feeling that the particular situation you are describing is the result of a (possibly unfortunate) use of love to categorize a broader set of emotions/reactions. I may be wrong, but I don't imagine that one gets the same psychological and physiological effects from "love" for a person and "love" for a sunset. They may be quite similar in some respects (leading to the ambiguous term), but I still have trouble with them being the same "love".

Zach L:

You...! I was typing almost the same thing word for word, then got frustrated with the way the words were pulling at me and quit. Stop copying my brain!

Hmm... Great minds think alike, eh? Or maybe it's deranged minds. Anyway... :D

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Originally Posted by the dead tree

I don´t think so, because the personality/qualities/whatever we love can completely change.

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But my thought is, is it really those qualities of a person that we 'love' or something we can't describe ?

New theory.

Love - Pointless bullI am sillyI am sillyI am sillyI am silly.