The invitation to participate in the seminar on Theory was simultaneously pleasing and puzzling: I was pleased to be paired with Tilottama Rajan, towards whose work I am intellectually sympathetic, but puzzled by the rubric under which I was asked to articulate the relation of my Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol to her Dark Interpreter. My only contributions to what is conventionally understood...

We show how Alice and Bob can establish whether they love each other, but without the embarrassement of revealing that they do if the other party does not share their feelings. This is a “secure multiparty computation” of the AND function, where the participants cooperate in producing the result of the AND, but without learning the input bit contributed by the other party unless the result

The creative process has mystified thinkers in the western tradition at least since Plato. According to Oatley (in press), our contemporary view of creativity is predominantly Romantic. From the Romantic perspective, beauty, goodness, and truth are inherent in human nature and we have access this natural way of being through our emotions. Thus, romanticism offers a theory of the creative proces...

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) Approach claims that there are some universalities in all languages. Speech acts seem to be present in all languages, but considering this approach, research has not indicated whether request speech act differs from one language to another. Thus, this study intended to investigate whether request strategies are used differently in English and Persian roma...

An influential evolutionary account of romantic jealousy proposes that natural selection shaped a specific sexually-dimorphic psychological mechanism in response to relationship threat. However, this account has faced considerable theoretical and methodological criticism and it remains unclear whether putative sex differences in romantic jealousy actually exist and, if they do, whether they are...

Youths' ability to positively cope with negative emotions and their self-perceived friendship competence were examined as potential moderators of links between multiple aspects of romantic relationships and residualized increases in depressive symptoms from late adolescence into early adulthood. Participants included 184 teens (46% male; 42% non-White) assessed at ages 15 to 19 and 21, as well ...

CONTEXT Despite the vast amount of existing research on adolescent sexual behavior, little is known about the trajectory of social, romantic and sexual events within an adolescent's relationship. METHODS A subsample of participants in Wave 2 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (8,438 respondents aged 12-21) provided data on the sequence of 15 social, romantic and sexual ev...

OBJECTIVE Experiencing romantic love is an important part of individual development. Here, we investigated stability and change in romantic love and psychological correlates, including mood states, anxiety, and sleep, among Iranian adolescents over a period of 8 months. METHOD Two hundred and one adolescents who had taken part in a previous study were contacted; 157 responded. Participants co...

Sociometer theory proposes that self-esteem is an adaptation which evolved to monitor and regulate interpersonal relationships. It is therefore sensitive to self-assessments in domains relevant to relational desirability. Positive relationships between self-perceived physical attractiveness and self-esteem found in previous studies may reflect the functioning of a mating sociometer, designed to...