First of all, love is an important way for young people to release their increasingly strong sexual impulses. Contact the opposite sex through love, so that young people are no longer depressed and nervous about sexy. Secondly, the development of sexual consciousness can only be perfected through the stage of love. Sexual identity should also be established through love. Moreover, love means more to young people than that. Because love is the deep contact between two people's personalities. In this process, young people's self-concept is developed under the influence of each other. They really know how to adjust their own defects to adapt to each other while maintaining their independence. In other words, after falling in love. Love is of great significance to the development of certain personality factors and social emotions. Moreover, the deep communication between the two people in love has laid the foundation for improving young people's communicative ability and adapting to the future society. No wonder some psychologists believe that love is the most important event in the late adolescence and early adulthood. Only after falling in love can people really mature.
The university environment is unique: for college students, it provides a buffer environment when young people step into society. With this buffer, young people can complete socialization more calmly and develop their self-concept more perfectly, without feeling the strong contrast and psychological discomfort of falling directly into society from young people. From this perspective, college students' love is not a bad thing, but it is very helpful for the maturity of young people. In addition, college students generally think that they are no longer naive teenagers, and the love sung in literature and art is of course their goal.
(B) the negative impact of love on the psychological development of college students
Although the meaning of love has a positive side, it sometimes damages the mental health of young people. First of all, life events such as being madly in love and widowed in marriage are events with high scores on the psychological stress scale. Excessive excitement and sadness will aggravate psychological tension. Love is something that makes people happy and painful. Young people in love will be happy or upset about some small things. Therefore, love brings a high degree of psychological tension. The further development of love will also bring social problems, which is also an important factor of psychological obstacles. Such as the increase of premarital sex. , causing the psychological burden of young people to be overweight.
Although men and women in love will feel strong psychological tension, the coexistence and comfort of both sides, as well as the sweetness of love, will alleviate their anxiety. Those who suffer setbacks in love are not so lucky. Young people who are lovelorn will lose their souls and feel that the meaning of life no longer exists, and life will only be pain and torture, and some people even go to a dead end. Without proper psychological guidance or strong self-control, lovelorn will have a great psychological impact on young people.
Visible love is a double-edged sword for young people. On the one hand, it helps the psychological development of young people to mature, on the other hand, it also brings various psychological problems. This may be the truth of life. If you want to get a sweet return, you must stand the test.
Second, the psychological structure and development stage of love
(A) the concept of love in social psychology
Love is the peak of interpersonal influence, attraction and affinity. Psychologists have studied interpersonal attraction thoroughly, but love has only recently become a scientific research topic. The mystery of love has brought great difficulties to its research. Therefore, psychology has not made much achievements in the field of love.
Walster and his wife are social psychologists who have made great contributions to the study of love. Through the analysis of a large number of cases, they put forward that there are two basic forms of love: one is romantic love dominated by lust, and the other is a state of "enthusiastic investment in another person". Sometimes, lovers are people who can communicate for a long time for their partners and to meet their own needs. Sometimes, lovers are those who are obsessed with finally getting the love of the other half and trying to satisfy their own erotic impulses. "This intense love is manifested in a tense state of physiological activation. The other is the love of partners. It means "our feelings for those who are inseparable from our lives". Companion love is stronger and more lasting than short-lived romantic love. In a love relationship, behavior is often based on the consideration of the interests of both parties, and partner love makes people put the interests of their partners above themselves.
Because romantic love is accompanied by strong physiological activation, Walster uses S.Schachter's emotional arousal theory to explain it. Schacht believes that emotional state is the result of the integration of cognitive process (desire), physiological state and environmental factors in the cerebral cortex. The core of emotional arousal model is cognition, and the evaluation of physiological activation by cognition is the key. Walster pointed out that love will also be enhanced by the interpretation of physiological activation. Lovers in the storm will feel that their love is closer. The reason is that the storm causes strong physiological changes, and lovers perceive the physiological changes and think that this physiological change is caused by love. The role of cognition changes the experience of love. The cognitive explanation of the change of body state is an integral part of romantic love.
(B) the psychological structure of love
Social psychologists' explanation of love is not perfect. The explanation of physiological changes cannot explain that love is comprehensive. But at least it proves that love includes two basic structural components: sex and love. Gao Yuxiang wrote in Psychology of Interpersonal Communication: "Love can be understood as a special emotional system composed of some interrelated and functional elements. This emotional system is: love based on complex factors such as sexual desire, pursuit of the opposite sex, personality (sense of obligation, morality). "
It is necessary and beneficial to divide love into sex and love. This distinction makes it easy for us to see some characteristics of love. The sexual desire basis of sex makes love exclusive, impulsive and intuitive. Sexual activity is generally a hidden event between two people, so that both parties in love will exclude a third person from entering the secret world of two people and interfere with the closest love relationship. Exclusivity can be divided into "external exclusion" and "internal exclusion" "Exclusion" refers to the emotional relationship between one's lover and other opposite sex; Exclusion is a kind of self-discipline, which prevents other opposite sex from falling in love with their lover and interferes with sweet love. Being single-minded helps to maintain the stability of love, and being single-minded and not distracted by others is the basic requirement between lovers. However, the extreme tendency of xenophobia has become a morbid state. Some people, out of jealousy, do not allow their lovers to have normal contacts with other members of the opposite sex, which will bring high psychological tension to both parties in love.
Impulse is the fundamental feature of sex. Love comes from the basic needs of physiological impulses, so lovers are always excited about love and need more intimate relationships with each other. The impulse of love makes love full of vigor and vitality. Men and women in love are often highly excited about small things and have higher creative enthusiasm than usual. But irresistible impulse can also lead to the enhancement of sexual desire, which will lead to sexual behavior if it is not restrained. Because sex pays attention to sensory factors such as physical attraction and congenial temperament, intuition is also an important feature of love. Youth love pays attention to the feeling and impression of meeting once. The so-called love at first sight is to feel the external beauty of the other party and have feelings. Social psychology research shows that the first impression often plays a decisive role in interpersonal communication. Love is also a kind of interpersonal communication, and it is no exception. However, love involves future marriage and long-term relationship, and relying too much on intuition will often bring endless troubles.
(3) development stage
There are many ways to divide the development stages of love. The following points are recognized by many people: choosing courtship stage, falling in love stage and family role-playing stage.
Choosing courtship is the key to successful love. It is not easy to choose a suitable partner. Courtship begins when a young man feels that he or she has found the one in his or her heart. Some people divide courtship into drunkenness, doubt, non-ego and self-reform. Drunk, I mean intoxicated by the object of pursuit. I don't know if the other person is in love with me. Did he (she) say three more words to me today to show his intimacy with me? I don't enter into substantive courtship, give up my hobbies for each other, and so on. , to adapt to each other. I mean that love is fixed at first, and lovers put each other's interests above themselves.
Make love after courtship. The feelings in love are ups and downs, sometimes reaching the peak, sometimes entering the trough or even breaking down. Love is a period of confirmation, discovery and judgment for young people. Prove my idealized views on lovers in the courtship stage, and find some advantages and disadvantages that I didn't notice in courtship. Love is a stage where two people get along day and night, and its advantages and disadvantages are easier to show than courtship. According to the comprehensive impression of these advantages and disadvantages, both parties in love make a judgment to see if this relationship is worth continuing.
If you make a positive judgment in the hot stage, love will gradually develop into the stage of family role-playing. Lovers fell into reality from the romantic fog and began to think about daily necessities and ways to make a living. This kind of family role-playing lays the foundation and paves the way for future marriage life.
Third, the factors affecting young people's love
Physiological factors
Satisfying sexual impulse is an important inducement to encourage young people to engage in love activities. In the stage when sexual consciousness develops into passionate love, the demand for sexual desire is increasingly strong, and the sexual impulse spread in the previous stage is concentrated on the selected special object. Driven by sexual impulses, young people begin to date alone and do not engage in group activities. This is love.
It can be seen that physiological needs are very important for young people in love. As pointed out in the psychological structure analysis of love, sex and love should be equally important, and it is impossible to ignore either one.
The development of sexual consciousness has gone through the stage of worshipping the elderly. Young people at this stage idealize and idolize an elder of the opposite sex as a lifelong lover, only dare to look at it from a distance and dare not really approach it. Acacia at this time is pure spiritual yearning, and the sexual component is suppressed. The worship of the old people left a deep impression on the young people, and until the normal love in the future, they often experienced such an idealized acacia. In the early days of love, many young people do not pursue sexual satisfaction, but focus on spiritual yearning. I feel very small in front of each other, and I dare not blaspheme my lover's sacred greatness with my physical low-level needs. This was originally a normal stage. But if you are stuck at this stage for a long time and devote yourself to suppressing sexual impulses, it is not normal. Some people insist that love is sacred and pure during the whole love period, so they are unwilling to admit their sexual requirements for lovers, which is harmful. Sexual impulse is a physiological phenomenon, which will not be eliminated with depression, but will only accumulate strength in depression to launch the next charge. Long-term depression can cause serious psychological tension and anxiety.
Social culture has deepened the rationality of love in two aspects intentionally or unintentionally. The first is the influence of literary works. Many people fall in love in order to try the long-awaited sweet love recited in poems and novels. Literary works often exaggerate the purity and sacredness of love and strengthen the tendency of young people to idealize love. They draw a conclusion from poems and novels that pure spiritual pursuit is a hundred times more important than low-level carnal desire, so they pursue noble and sacred things and belittle dirty carnal desire. The second is the role of social ethics and educational methods. An important feature of asceticism sex education is to provide spiritual strength to suppress carnal desires: religion provides original sin and God, and philosophy provides rationality ... Adult society always instills the concept of sexual guilt in young people. All these inevitably affect the youth's view of love.
Sex education is an effective way to eliminate the psychological imbalance caused by morbid love concept (the most typical is Platonic spiritual love, which is advocated by some college students). As long as young people really realize that sexual needs are normal and reasonable, morbidness will be eliminated.