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Love as Intimacy

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Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Experience and Expression of Love

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Abstract

This chapter reviews the experience of intimacy in love, its various interpretations and value in different cultures. It also discusses the Western and Eastern ways of expression of intimacy, as well as the cultural variety of specific norms of expression of intimacy. Among those, the most studied in cross-cultural research are closeness, communication, self-disclosure, and self-expression. The role of cultural parameters, such as individualism vs. collectivism, gender equality, is discussed. The cross-cultural studies of self-disclosure and expressions are reviewed in detail.

The chapter reviews the variety of experiences and expressions of intimacy, 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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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 Intimacy. In: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Experience and Expression of Love . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15020-4_12

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