The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equation (Ted Books)

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One thing in this book missing is there's no rough sheet to keep your experiment data down. It's a book of tutorial too— a bit joke. Seriously! :P En conjunto sale un librito con un montón de información entretenida, que da pistas y enlaces a muchísima más información y que nos da un paseo bastante amplio por varios barrios de las mates. Me ha encantado. In negative relationships, however, the situation is reversed. Bad behavior is considered the norm: “He’s always like that,” or “Yet again. She’s just showing how selfish she is.” Instead, it’s the positive behavior that is considered unusual: “He’s only showing off because he got a pay raise at work. It won’t last,” or “Typical. She’s doing this because she wants something. However, some of the interactions in the 20th century sections would today be given the label of ‘abuse’, even though they are written with immense tenderness through the eyes of a willing ‘victim’. That conflict was the only discomfort that remained as I finished a thoroughly satisfying read.

Fry examines what psychologists studying longtime couples have found about the key to successful relationships:In fact, this “price of admission” problem is also at the heart of a chapter probing the question of how you know your partner is “The One.” Fry writes: Like Harlow and Bowlby, for me the relationship was the unit. And I've looked at emotion and how it's really communicated — and what people are thinking. Showing people their videotapes and finding out what's going on in their minds. Because we don't know. Also I've been influenced by the whole field of psycho-physiology, which also developed in large measure at the University of Wisconsin. I've worked with Bob Levinson, who's a psycho-physiologist and we've put together these influences. Ekman and Levenson and Darwin and psycho-physiology, and the study of the body and the face and voice and emotion in relationships, and just try to understand the naturalistic development of relationships. How do people respond emotionally to one another? That was what really fascinated me: observing people and trying to see what you could learn from a much more objective analysis. I've been influenced tremendously by my friend Paul Ekman's work Looking at Faces, which started with Charles Darwin's and Sylvan Tomkin's work, looking at the universality of how emotions get expressed, by Harry Harlow and John Bowlby's work in how normal dependency is in relationships. These views presented a new alternative to behaviorism and also to psychoanalysis. What I have added to this field of emotion is my concept of "met-emotion," or how people feel about feelings, what their history is with specific emotions like pride, respect or disrespect, love, fear, anger, sadness. What their philosophy is about emotions and why they have this philosophy. It's critical to parenting and to couple relationships as well. It determines emotional behavior in families. And with my former students Lynn Katz and Dan Yoshimoto the study of meta-emotion now is providing us with new tools for changing families.

This is that rare thing, a book that works on every conceivable level. Plot, pace, language and tone combine to produce an uncommonly good read, a piece of quietly confident writing that is remarkable in a first novel… This is a novel of extremes: there is suffering, violent and disturbing portraits of war and of personal loss; but equally extreme moments of joy and human understanding. At its core are the emotions that most shape us — love and loss. Psychologist John Gottman's goal is "to be like the guy who invented Velcro. Nobody remembers his name, but everybody uses Velcro". He is a psychologist who looks at relationships and focus on the interaction, the "fleeting architectural fluid form that people are creating as they talk to each other, as they smile, as they move."I was expecting to see her deliver these nuggets of math wisdom in her witty and humorous style in the book (as she does in her videos) and boy did she deliver! There are some hopeful signs that interventions will be effective at changing all that. We have done two randomized clinical trials so far and we can reverse almost all of these negative effects on relationships and on babies. Also, at this point in the United States, it seems like we're going through a major sociological shift, and I don't know where it came from. In the last 40 years it seems that men have really changed. Forty years ago men didn't attend the birth of their babies, now 91 percent of men do attend the birth of their babies. That's interesting. But there something else too. What I'm seeing everywhere in the United States, regardless of ethnicity, and race, and culture, and social class, is that men have changed in very dramatic ways. And in a very fundamental way that has to do with existential choice and meaning, men want to be involved in the life of their babies, to be better fathers, and through that, to be better partners, as well. The major commitment is really to the baby. It's a spectacular change. This formula, it turns out, is a cross-purpose antidote to FOMO, applicable to various situations when you need to know when to stop looking for a better option: Emma Darwin, happily, seems able to immerse herself in 19th Century England” ... Both eerie and intriguing. - Australian Financial Review