Longing, Intimacy and Loneliness

Ami Rokach

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415842181
• eBook ISBN: 9781134929344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book examines the very basic human need to belong. It looks at the intimacy that is a cornerstone of such belonging and closeness, romantic relationships, which signify belonging in the Western world, and loneliness and love, which are inextricably linked to the subject. The book examines these constructs and considers other issues such as the basic human need to belong; the different love styles and how are they expressed; empathy, social support and humour and their influence on looseness and romantic elations; loneliness and marital adjustment; the influence of culture on relationships and the loneliness felt by the partner.

This book is based on papers that were originally published in the Journal of Psychology.

PART I: WHAT CONTRIBUTES TO A GOOD INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP

Dimensions and Aspects of Longing: Age and Gender Differences in Swedish 9-, 12-, and 15-Year-Old Children

OLLE HOLM

ABSTRACT. Longing can be defined as a secondary emotion, as a blend of the primary emotions of love and sadness. There are several possible dimensions and aspects of longing (O. Holm, 1999). Both age and gender differences are well documented in earlier research on other emotions. In the present investigation, 122 girls and 120 boys, ages 9, 12, and 15 years, in compulsory school in Sweden, answered a questionnaire about dimensions and aspects of their own longing. The results showed both age and gender differences. Girls, especially in the 15-year-old group, experienced longing significantly more than boys. The results were interpreted as generally in accordance with what is known from earlier research on other emotions.

IN RESEARCH ON EMOTIONS, some, such as love and sadness, have attracted the interest of several investigators and theorists, and others have received almost no attention at all. Longing is one of these unnoticed emotions. Although most human beings have experienced longing, it is seldom mentioned in the scientific emotion literature. In everyday language the word is well known and understood, and if one listens to the lyrics of popular music, for example, one often hears the expression of longing for someone or something that isn’t present at the moment.

Longing can be considered a blend of love and sadness (Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson, & O’Connor, 1987), and its synonym, yearning, was described by Kemper (1987) as a blend of depression and happiness. Longing was defined by Holm (1999) as a blend of love and sadness, sometimes with some other emotion involved. It is possible that the kinship with such powerful emotions as love, happiness, sadness, and depression has led to the relative neglect of longing in scientific research.

Longing and the terms that seem to be most related to it—yearning and desire—are defined in Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (1994) as the following: Longing is an “intense desire” (p. 735), yearning is described as either a “strong desire or tender longing” (p. 1485), and desire is described as “strong sexual longing” or “desire for something/to do something” (p. 325).

Desire has been used as a key concept in a number of studies and books in different fields, most recently as an educational motivational concept—the desire to learn—by Oldfather, West, White, and Wilmarth (1999), and as the most basic of all human motives—an instinctive desire for continued life—by Pyszczynski, Greenberg, and Solomon (1997). In a developmental psychological study by Lee, Eskritt, Symons, and Muir (1998), 2-year-old children were shown to use eye gaze for desire inference; and in feminist psychology, adolescent girls’ experiences of sexual desire were studied by Tolman and Szalacha (1999). In a psychoanalytical article by Meissner (1999), desire and sexual desire are grouped with other motivational concepts for discussion purposes. Thus, desire can have quite different meaning in different contexts.

Yearning is often used in psychoanalytical writings as a concept in connection with object losses (often parents) (Frankiel, 1994; Freudenberger & Gallagher, 1995; Lifton, 1990) or with grief (Melges & DeMaso, 1980). Other kinds of yearning are found in romantic love (Person, 1991), in yearning for intimacy (McAdams, 1989), and in yearning for things that are past (Davis, 1979). Thus, yearning is also used with somewhat different meanings in different contexts. But both yearning and desire are found more often than longing, at least in scientific writings.

Because longing, as a concept, has not been treated more than marginally by researchers, in the literature review for this study I focused mainly on what can be found for emotions generally, and with respect to age and gender differences, because the participants in this investigation were boys and girls aged 9 to 15 years. The literature shows that development from initial innate reactions to a multiplicity of emotions takes place early in life. From general reactions that show distress, contentment, and interest (Lewis, 1993), infants at 3 months of age already show a dozen emotions (Emde, 1980; Izard & Buechler, 1979; Sroufe, 1984).

Schemas of objects, events, and persons also appear early (Jacobs, 1993; Stem, 1985), and affect experiences (Harrison, 1986). During the first 3 years, the majority of adult emotions emerge and develop in a child (Lewis, 1993), and there is continous development past 3 years of age (Lewis; Michalson & Lewis, 1985). The so-called child’s theory of mind (Astington, Harris, & Olson, 1988; Harris, 1991, 1993; Wellman, 1990) describes the development of children’s understanding of emotions from age 1 (intentionality) over the preschool years (belief and desire) to the school years (external expression of an internal state).

The development of emotions has been described from a general perspective by Fisher, Shaver, and Camochan (1990), who described the developmental process as gradually moving from basic to culture-specific, subordinate category emotions; and as developing through stages: three (Reissland, 1985) or five (Harter & Buddin, 1987). Harris (1993) and Whitesell and Harter (1989) have also given descriptions of specialized emotion development. At about 8 years old, children realize that their actions ought to meet moral and social standards if they wish to be proud of what they have done. At about the age of 9, they acknowledge that the same situation can provoke two opposite emotions, whereas younger children usually do not admit that more than one emotion can be experienced at a time. Similar results are reported by Olthof, Terwogt, van Eck, and Koops (1987), and Terwogt, Koops, Oosterhoff, and Ollhof (1986). Age effects in training children to acknowledge mixed emotions have also been reported. Six- to 7-year-olds were found to benefit more from such training than 4- to 5-year-olds (Peng, Johnson, Pollock, & Glasspool, 1992).

In the preschool years, children already seem to understand that a perspective or belief partly determines how a person feels (Nannis & Cowan, 1987; Saarni, 1993). In middle childhood they also start to use mental strategies to change emotional experiences. Whereas younger children may try to change a situation (externally), older children may look inward to see if the internal experience can be changed, for example, by a reinterpretation of the situation or by focusing on something positive (Saarni, 1993). Cognitive self-control strategies such as redirecting thoughts have been found to be more common among 9-year-olds than among 7-year-old children (Tsukamoto, 1997). Such strategies mature gradually and also depend on cognitive and verbal skills. Compared with adults, neither 8- nor 11 - year-olds were able to produce vocabulary that expressed emotion concepts described by adults (Aldridge & Wood, 1997).

Age differences in the development of emotions have been found in many studies. Glasberg and Aboud (1982) found that kindergartners and second graders differed regarding sadness. The younger children denied sad experiences more than the older children and were also less likely to see sadness as part of their personal disposition. Age differences between preschoolers and third and fourth graders have been reported regarding the ability to match and generate affective labels for emotionally laden situations, among them sadness (Brady & Harrison, 1987). In an investigation of children from Grades 1, 3, 5, and 7 who described situations in which they were sad and assessed the intensity of sadness, the younger children tended to report lower levels of sadness than the older children (Rotenberg, Mars, & Crick, 1987).

In a study of anger and sadness, children in Grades 5, 8, and 11 expressed greater self-efficacy and regulation of sadness than of anger (Zeman & Shipman, 1997). Age differences in understanding and expressing emotions may disappear as individuals grow older.

In a study of experiences of sorrow with two groups, ages 15 to 16.5 and 20 to 25 years old, no differences were found (Magen, Birenbaum, & Pery, 1996). In a study by Russell and Ridgeway (1983), the same dimensional structure in data for both third graders and college students was reported. Thus, age differences or lack of them may depend on experiences rather than on cognitive maturation beyond a certain level. In a study comparing young children (from 4 years old) with older ones (up to 12 years), Harter and Buddin (1987) found that the younger children used a more basic set of emotions than the older children did.

Knowledge of how and when to control emotional displays increases between Grades 1 and 5, but then levels off (Gnepp & Hess, 1986). Children in four age groups (first, third, fifth, and seventh graders) who were asked about their anger, experienced similar causes and intensities for anger but differed in their motives and in the consequences. The older children showed increases most clearly in the constructive motive of making others see their point of view and in verbal insult and indirect retaliation as consequences. Physical assault decreased with age (Rotenberg, 1985). Research on children’s perceptions of the perceived controllability of negative events showed systematic relations between pity and uncontrollability and between anger and controllability for age groups 6 to 7, 8 to 9, and 11 years old. A developmental increase in the linkage of guilt to controllable events was also found (Graham, Doubleday, & Guarino, 1984).

Age differences in self-attributed embarrassment were reported in a study by Bennett (1989) in which three different situations—no audience, a passive audience, or an active (i.e., deriding) audience—were described. For 5- and 8-year-old children, embarrassment was significantly greater in the active audience condition than in the passive audience condition. For older children, of 11 and 13 years, any audience was potentially embarrassing. That is, there was a shift from concern with others’ manifest reactions to subjective evaluations of the self with age.

That audiences are important for both embarrassment and pride was also shown in a study by Seidner, Stipek, and Feshbach (1988). They found that references to social comparision increased with age in children 5, 7, 9, and 11 years old. Cognitive structural development influences emotional understanding, which, in turn, influences how emotional experiences are internalized and conceptualized (Nannis, 1988).

Gender differences in emotion have also attracted many investigators, who seem to have concentrated more of their research on somewhat older children, but gender differences in younger children have also been shown. Birnbaum (1983) showed that children 3 to 5 years old believed that adult men showed anger more than adult women and that fear, sadness, and happiness were shown more by women. Older boys increasingly inhibit most emotions, whereas girls inhibit socially unacceptable ones such as anger (Brody, 1985). This fact does not necessarily imply that boys do not notice emotions. In a study of emotion identification in others, girls were better than boys in correctly identifying emotions at 3 years of age, but at age 5 boys were significantly better than girls (Adams, Summers, & Christopherson, 1993); and in a study of humane attitudes toward peers, boys showed more humane attitudes than girls did (Abramenkova, 1983).

But in a longitudinal study of continuities in emotion understanding by Brown and Dunn (1996), girls outperformed boys. Girls also had higher average scores than boys in a study of facial and verbal measures of empathy with children 5, 9, and 13 years old (Strayer & Roberts, 1997), Anger is shown more by boys, according to findings by Buntaine and Costenbader (1997). Boys in Grades 4 and 5 reported significantly higher levels of aggressive responses than girls in a se If-report anger questionnaire; in this study, differences in the locations of the schools was also found to play a role. As a group, the children in urban settings reported significantly higher levels of anger than children in rural and suburban settings (Buntaine & Costenbader).

Adults can be expected to pass on their conceptions to children. Some studies of gender differences in emotion have ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Longing, Intimacy and Loneliness: The Interplay Between Romance, Love and Alienation - An Introduction
• Part I: What Contributes to a Good Intimate Relationship
• Part II: Loneliness and Intimate Relationships
• Index