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Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Experience and Expression of Love pp 175–185Cite as

Love as Benevolence

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Abstract

This chapter highlights the old cultural idea that love is the benevolent intentions and actions toward other; it is the wishing and doing something good to other. It requires the feeling of empathy, compassion, caring, altruism, and sometimes, abnegation of self-interests. The chapter reviews cross-cultural studies of agape love attitude. The studies of cultural practices of gift-giving within romantic love model are reviewed.

The chapter reviews the variety of experiences and expressions of benevolent love, such as agape and compassion, the methods and measures, which researchers employed to study those, and the results that they obtained in their studies. The chapter describes in details (1) the research designs, (2) methods, (3) instruments and measures, (4) samples (including their location, sample size, and other details), and (5) the data and results of studies (including descriptive statistics, such as means and size of correlations).

The details of descriptive statistics help readers understand what the differences in the means for cultural samples are, what is the size of correlations, and other statistics. These details allow readers to make independent judgments about reliability and validity of results.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The items of LAS were rated and scored with 1 = strongly agree, and 5 = strongly disagree. Therefore, the lower score stands for the higher love style measured by a given item. The agreement side of the scale (positive endorsement of an item) was indicated in scores below 3—the neutral point.

  2. 2.

    The items of LAS were rated and scored with 1 = strongly agree, and 5 = strongly disagree. Therefore, the lower score stands for the higher love style measured by a given item.

  3. 3.

    The items of LAS were rated and scored with 1 = strongly agree, and 5 = strongly disagree. Therefore, the lower score stands for the higher love style measured by a given item.

  4. 4.

    The items of LAS were rated and scored with 1 = strongly agree, and 5 = strongly disagree. Therefore, the lower score stands for the higher love style measured by a given item.

  5. 5.

    The items of LAS were rated and scored with 1 = strongly agree, and 5 = strongly disagree. Therefore, the lower score stands for the higher love style measured by a given item.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Aquinas College, Grand Rapids, MI, USA

    Victor Karandashev

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  1. Victor Karandashev
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Karandashev, V. (2019). Love as Benevolence. In: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Experience and Expression of Love . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15020-4_11

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