Passionate love is associated with intense changes in emotion and attention which are thought to play an important role in the early stages of romantic relationship formation. Although passionate love usually involves enhanced, near-obsessive attention to the beloved, anecdotal evidence suggest that the lover’s concentration for daily tasks like study and work may actually be impaired, suggesti...

We examined whether ambiance, a qualitative relationship characteristic, predicted condom use in Greek young adults’ dating relationships, along with other objective relationship characteristics, such as relationship duration and coital sex frequency. Ambiance definition was based on the fundamental companionate-passionate love distinction. Participants were 277 Greek university students, 18-25...

Theorists such as Farber argue that in adolescence passionate love first appears in all its intensity. Both adolescence and passion are "intense, overwhelming, passionate, consuming, exciting, and confusing". As yet, however, clinicians have been given little guidance as to how to deal with adolescents caught up in their passionate feelings. Nor has there been much research into the nature of p...

We assessed the impact of an individual difference variable, relationship-focused thinking, on women's acute salivary cortisol responses during and after a guided imagery task. Specifically, 29 healthy women, all of whom were experiencing high levels of passionate love, but varied on levels of relationship-focused thinking, were assigned to one of two experimental conditions: a partner reflecti...

A packet of soft brown sugar informs us that ‘Since 1878 our passionate team have been making and packing high quality on the banks River Thames.’ There is an inadvertent touch grotesque comedy to this: Tate Lyle's employees seem be Dickensian monomaniacs, kept alive by their inexhaustible enthusiasm for sentimental attachment Thames. How does this bizarre sentence come distributed around super...

This article considers the transfer and circulation of affects in Freud’s first clinical case, ‘Emmy Von N.’ We are especially concerned to tease out the unconscious communication of affects within Freud’s case study. In part, this is to contribute to an understanding of the relationship between affect and its representative, passionate, forms. In part, our close reading of the case study is al...