This chapter provides some questions and answers so that people can see for themselves. Most theories of love predict that, as time goes on, the passion in a relationship will begin to falter. According to the triangular theory of love, passion is the quickest component of a relationship to develop but also the quickest to die down. If they always need the thrill of the early days of a relationship, they may find themselves flitting from one relationship to the next without ever experiencing any deeper satisfaction. A mismatch of stories is not as obvious as disagreement over political beliefs, the desire to have children, or religious affiliation, but it can be just as challenging to a relationship. When people end serious relationships, they often go through a period in which they are just not ready to enter a new relationship.

This chapter provides a basic introduction of research design based on the question or goal to be accomplished by the research. Statistical significance has an interesting history and is a horribly misunderstood term. Fisherian statistics has a very different approach to statistical testing. More recently, though, there has been a resurgence of Bayesian analysis across a wide variety of fields such as business, education, finance, and sociology. There is a host of numeric studies that analyze numbers, and these are separated into experimental and nonexperimental studies. Experiments are quite popular and some call them the “gold standard” of research. There are main core types of content in surveys that motivation researchers desire: demographic, knowledge, behavioral, and attitudinal. Ethnography arose primarily out of the cultural and social anthropological fields, which studied both how culture affected behavior and how cultural processes evolved over time.

The 1960s were brought to the United States on television. In ensuing decades, psychologists would engage in inconclusive debates about whether violence on TV had social effects. Ultimately, psychologists’ isolation in the academy, their cultural backgrounds, and their focus on integrating individuals by adjustment and assimilation rather than on managing immediate mass social change pushed psychology, as a field, to the periphery of civil rights, at least as they pertained to color. The pages of psychology’s journal of record, the American Psychologist, recorded few traces of the Vietnam conflict, a central feature of American life in the second half of the 1960s. Counseling psychologists concentrated on civilian problems. Hospital clinicians worked to develop ways to implement the new community mental health system. The combined effect of the Community Mental Health Act and the Great Society’s medical programs was a further infusion of energy and resources into rapidly developing clinical psychology.

Racial and ethnic minorities may be represented only seldom in mainstream media, and when they are represented, they may be portrayed along narrow lines that reflect the stereotypes and prejudices of the dominant group. Stereotypes are used to prejudge members of that group rather than to evaluate them on their individual characteristics. Prejudice may often be used to promote a hostile social agenda such as racism, sexism, or religious bigotry. Mass media has incentives to cater most to the dominant and most lucrative group of individuals within a culture. Few issues in media portrayals of ethnic minorities have been as controversial as the portrayal of African Americans. Media tends to reflect the interests of dominant cultural units. Discussions of race and ethnicity and social justice are likely to change both the dominant culture’s views and media portrayals of race.

Evolutionary psychologists argue that passionate love is innate to human nature and is based on biological processes that are universal, applying to people of all cultures. However, it is possible that people fall in love more or less often depending on their culture's social organization and ideology. Research has found that some of the antecedents of falling in love are reciprocal liking, appearance, personality traits, similarity, familiarity and isolation. Even if romantic love occurs in many or even all cultures of the world, it is still reasonable to assume that the experience of being in love is colored by one's cultural values and the society to which one belongs. The emic approach gives us quite a different picture of what people considers love to be from that obtained with the etic approach.

Creativity, like genius, was once viewed as a spiritual phenomenon. In ancient times, to be creative was to be divine. Almost every human culture had its creation myth recounting the miraculous accomplishments of some spiritual power. The immortal Muse provided a guiding spirit or source of inspiration for the mortal creator. As Western civilization became more secular in emphasis, and especially during the enlightenment, the concept of creative genius lost its sacred accoutrements. Francis Galton argued that geniuses are those who possess an exceptional amount of natural ability. That is, geniuses would score in the upper tail of the normal distribution in intelligence, enthusiasm, and perseverance. Galton was the first to inquire about the impact of birth order, an unmistakably environmental variable. This chapter discusses the effect of environmental factors and the effect of genetics. Behavioral genetics is the scientific discipline committed to understanding how genes affect behavior in animals.