ABSTRACT
Social psychologists interested in unraveling the mysteries of interpersonal attraction have rarely turned to theory and research on emotion for inspiration and aid (see Berscheid, in press). This is true despite the fact that the subject of interpersonal attraction is commonly defined as the study of how people "affectively respond" to one another. This chapter first addresses the question of why this is so, or how it is that interpersonal attraction investigators have managed to almost wholly avoid the subject of emotion despite the fact that virtually all would agree with John Bowlby (1973) that: "affectional bonds [between people] and subjective states of emotion go together" and "many of the most intense of our human emotions arise during the formation, the maintenance, the disruption, and the renewal of affectional bonds [p. 40]."
