Love and Sex: Cross-Cultural Perspectives - Paperback

by Elaine Hatfield (Author), Richard L. Rapson (Author)

In this volume, noted scholars Elaine Hatfield and Richard Rapson focus on the cross-cultural research concerning the passionate beginnings of relationships: how people meet, fall in love, make love, and fall out of love, usually only to risk it all over again. Through in-depth analysis and astute assessment, they compare the way cultures try to set rules for these incendiary matters. Two main questions addressed are: 'What seems to be biological and universal?' and 'What seems to be socially constructed and transient?' Taking a historical perspective, the authors ask where different societies, and the world itself, are headed?

Author Biography

Elaine Hatfield (B.A. Michigan, Ph.D. Stanford) is Professor of Psychology at the University of Hawaii. She is well known as the scholar who pioneered the scientific study of passionate and companionate love. She has written many books on her research, among them two books that won the American Psychological Foundation's National Media Award: A New Look at Love and Mirror, Mirror: The Importance of Looks in Everyday Life. For the past two decades she has been generally ranked in citation reviews as the most frequently quoted social psychologist in the world.
Richard L. Rapson(B.A. Amherst, Ph.D. Columbia) is Professor of History at the University of Hawaii. He has written a dozen books of history that focus on the psychological side of American life. He has also collaborated with Elaine Hatfield, his wife on a number of other books, including Emotional Contagion and Love, Sex, and Intimacy: Their Psychology, Biology, and History, as well as several recent novels.