Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Institut Jean Nicod, École Normale Supérieure, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris Sciences and Lettres Research University, 75005, Paris, France.
Neurology Department, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103, Leipzig, Germany.
Arch Sex Behav. 2024 Mar;53(3):901-915. doi: 10.1007/s10508-023-02759-4. Epub 2023 Dec 26.
In Western Europe, the Early Modern Period is characterized by the rise of tenderness in romantic relationships and the emergence of companionate marriage. Despite a long research tradition, the origins of these social changes remain elusive. In this paper, we build on recent advances in behavioral sciences, showing that romantic emotional investment, which is more culturally variable than sexual attraction, enhances the cohesion of long-term relationships and increases investment in children. Importantly, this long-term strategy is considered especially advantageous when living standards are high. Here, we investigate the relationship between living standards, the emotional components of love expressed in fiction work, and behavioral outcomes related to pair bonding, such as nuptial and fertility rates. We developed natural language processing measures of "emotional investment" (tenderness) and "attraction" (passion) and computed romantic love in English plays (N = 847) as a ratio between the two. We found that living standards generally predicted and temporally preceded variations of romantic love in the Early Modern Period. Furthermore, romantic love preceded an increase in nuptial rates and a decrease in births per marriage. This suggests that increasing living standards in the Early Modern Period may have contributed to the emergence of modern romantic culture.
在西欧，近代早期的特点是浪漫关系中温柔的兴起和陪伴式婚姻的出现。尽管有很长的研究传统，但这些社会变化的起源仍然难以捉摸。在本文中，我们借鉴行为科学的最新进展，表明浪漫的情感投入（比性吸引力更具有文化变异性）增强了长期关系的凝聚力，并增加了对子女的投资。重要的是，当生活水平较高时，这种长期策略被认为具有特别优势。在这里，我们研究了生活水平、小说作品中表达的爱的情感成分以及与配对关系相关的行为结果（如结婚率和生育率）之间的关系。我们开发了“情感投入”（温柔）和“吸引力”（激情）的自然语言处理度量，并计算了英语戏剧中的浪漫爱情（N=847），这是两者之间的比率。我们发现，生活水平通常可以预测和预示近代早期浪漫爱情的变化。此外，浪漫爱情先于结婚率的上升和每段婚姻的生育数量的下降。这表明，近代早期生活水平的提高可能促成了现代浪漫文化的出现。
