Loving the Psycho Next To Me

Love and hate are important human affects that are of long-standing interest in psychology. Increasingly, empirical research has been carried out on the relationship between love and hate. However, traditional psychological theories have mainly focused on love, especially romantic love. These include Sternberg’s (1986) triangular theory of love and the three-stage model of love (Fisher, 1989; Fisher et al., 2006). Love has been defined as an action (Swensen, 1972), attitude (Rubin, 1970), experience (Skolnick, 1978), and even as a prototypical emotion (Fehr and Russell, 1991; Post, 2002; Sober, 2002; Wyschogrod, 2002). Collectively, these definitions suggest that love is a multi-faced phenomenon (Ekman, 1972; Izard, 1977; Tomkins, 1984). Hate, within the context of a romantic relationship, arises mainly from a relational betrayal. Researchers have proposed a concept related to romantic hate, romantic jealousy, which describes the negative attitudes, anger, and fear associated with having a relationship partner (Yoshimura, 2004). Love and hate are related to each other in a complex manner; the methodological approaches used by previous researchers have limited effectiveness in exploring the intricate relationship between love and hate. In addition, there has been little research on the psychological mechanisms that could explain the interrelations between love and hate. Therefore, our study investigates how these two affects are related. To pursue such a research objective, one must consider how best to induce varying levels of feelings of love. Previous studies have found that attraction is a crucial condition for the development of romantic love (Cutler et al., 1998; Braxton-Davis, 2010; Miller and Maner, 2010). Similarity, rather than complementarity, plays a key role in attraction (Berscheid and Reis, 1998; Luo and Klohnen, 2005; Hudson et al., 2014). Many aspects of similarity have been studied in relation to attraction. In the current study, we focused on similarity in ideologies. That is, persons with similar ideologies (defined here in terms of values and interests) tend to form longer lasting and more harmonious relationships (Buunk and Bosman, 1986; Lemay and Clark, 2008). Ideological similarity also implies commonalities in behaviors which further contribute to mutual attraction in the context of romantic love (Schafer and Keith, 1990). From this perspective, similarity may be a key factor that influences the degree of love. In addition, researchers found that differences in excellence levels, such as those relating to ability and achievement, between partners would also be an important factor influencing romantic relationships (Conroy-Beam et al., 2016). In the present study, we manipulated the level of similarity and the level of excellence to induce different levels of love. That is, we concurrently varied the levels of similarity and excellence of different targets. We explored whether participants felt stronger love for a target who was more similar to themselves when the targets and participants were of the same level of excellence. Additionally, we were also interested in whether participants have different emotional reactions toward different target persons in the context of romantic love and hate. We examined two research questions in the current research. First, would there be greater feelings of love between two persons if they were more similar to each other? Second, under certain conditions, does a person’s love generate a corresponding level of hate when negative events occurred to his or her romantic partner? In this study, we implemented a paradigm similar to what has been used in previous research (Takahashi et al., 2009), and adapted the scenario method to induce love and hate. The characters in the scenario included one protagonist and three targets. Participants read the scenario and imagined that they were the protagonist and were in a romantic relationship with one of the target. We induced different levels of love by manipulating the degree of similarity (e.g., values and interests) and excellence (e.g., ability and achievements) between the protagonist and target persons in the vignettes. We also induced hate using vignettes that showed target persons betraying the protagonist, such as going on dates or having affairs with people of the opposite-s*x. We hypothesized that greater similarity between a participant (protagonist) and a target would be associated with greater feelings of love, and that when negative events occur with the protagonist’s romantic partner, the target would be associated with greater feelings of hate.