ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the issue of how the particular emotion comes about in the first place. Love is generally considered a uniquely human emotion. The misattribution perspective on love primarily takes into account the importance of unexplained arousal, and it awards thinking a somewhat subsidiary status, as it limits its role to the task of explaining the arousal. In many ways, the intellectual godfather of all individual difference approaches to love is John Lee's typology of love as colors. On the basis of his combined analysis, he identified 12 different love styles that characterized the way most people experience and think about love. Despite its shortcomings, Lee's typology has been influential in setting the stage for other typologies of love that, although still primarily descriptive in nature, avoid some of the problems inherent in Lee's theory. Working in a less inductive manner, Sternberg's triangular theory of love proposed that love consists of three basic ingredients: intimacy, passion, and decision/commitment.
