Browsing by Subject "Love"

Marketers seek to create and consumers seek to cultivate a variety of positive emotional experiences. Despite their importance to consumer behavior, researchers have lacked a clear understanding of the distinct behavioral consequences of specific positive emotions. My dissertation examines how different positive emotions (e.g., hope, love, and pride) can differentially affect consumers' decisions and behaviors. I find that positive emotions can not only be differentiated but also that specific positive emotions lead to distinctly different patterns of consumption behavior, such as considering more options, donating in different ways, engaging in more effortful actions, or performing more socially conscious consumption behaviors benefiting distant others. I find important differences both with momentary emotional experiences and downstream consequences of chronic emotional experiences.

Positive emotions differ reliably in the degree to which they create a lens of problem-solving, social connection, and perceived control. For example, I find that positive emotions characterized by a social connection lens (e.g., love and gratitude) lead to increases in socially conscious behaviors benefiting distant others. The tendency to perceive one's environment through a problem-solving lens (which characterizes hope and interest but not love and gratitude) leads to larger consideration sets and engagement in more effortful environmental actions. I also examine how positive emotions characterized by different lenses, such as perceived control (e.g., pride) and social connection (e.g., love), produce distinct behaviors within the same consumption context (e.g., giving in different ways in response to a fundraising appeal). Five studies demonstrate that positive emotions can be characterized in ways that allow prediction of distinct forms of broadening and specific consumption behaviors.

In this dissertation, I examine the widespread failure of racial reconciliation work between black and white Christians in US American churches. I treat such failure as a failure of love, specifically the failure of black and white Christians to love each other as enemies. This sets two primary tasks for the dissertation. First, I work to understand this failure of love. Drawing on black studies—on the work of Frank Wilderson, in particular—I examine what I call the racial enemy relation, which I argue is a fundamental antagonism between black people and white people. This antagonism is grounded in and perpetuates white supremacist systems of violence and exploitation. I turn to affect theory to argue that this enemy relation is obscured by a distorted love. At the heart of this distorted love is what Sara Ahmed calls the promise of happiness. In short, I argue that racial reconciliation work fails insofar as Christians embrace an idea of love that confuses good feelings with good relations and, in doing so, are unable to confront the racial enemy relation with faithful love.

Second, I give a Christian theological account of faithful love that can guide intervention into the distorted love of white supremacy and promote a constructive approach to love of the racial enemy. In conversation primarily with black, womanist, and feminist theologies, I argue for a notion of faithful love as the embrace of the lover’s need for the beloved, while holding such love accountable to self-love, love for God, and God’s love for those who suffer. I ground this account of love in an understanding of divine love as driven by God’s need for creation, including humanity. Ultimately, I argue that in confronting the racial enemy, Christians are called to embrace their need for their enemy and to pursue that need toward conditions of mutuality in their broader society.

My dissertation aims to shed light on the importance and distinctive nature of intimate relationships such as parent-child relationship and friendship by developing my own version of a virtue-ethical approach.

In Chapter 1, I critically examine important contemporary Western theories of filial piety and argue that they do not adequately capture the nature of a desirable parent-child relationship and filial piety.

In Chapter 2, I show why the duty-centered approach to filial piety is inadequate focusing on why it fails to make sense of filial love and argue that filial piety is better understood as a virtue by showing how it can do justice to the normative significance of filial love.

In Chapter 3, I introduce what I call ‘gratitude for being’ to capture the distinctive type of gratitude we owe to people who have consistent and particularized care for us, especially our parents. I argue that the idea of gratitude for being can best make sense of deep gratitude typically found among intimates who care for each other.

In Chapter 4, I introduce what I call ‘relational virtues,’ which are virtues required for the participants of a given type of personal relationship and argue that it offers a valuable resource for answering questions concerning the value of intimate personal relationships. Next, I propose my own relational virtue theory of filial piety.

In Chapter 5, I discuss several aspects of the Confucian conception of filial piety—early filial piety, the close connection between self-cultivation and filial piety, and postmortem filial piety—and show how my relational virtue theory can defend and make sense of them. Lastly, I show how my view of filial piety is different from the Confucian view, or at least a version of it.

In Chapter 6, I discuss the virtue of friendship as a relational virtue and show how it can make sense of the nature and value of friendship. In particular, I show why the virtue of friendship is distinct from general virtues such as benevolence or generosity and why it is morally important to have this virtue.

Finally, in Chapter 7, I propose what I call ‘relational activity view’ on partiality. After critically examining existing views on partiality, I suggest a picture of how special values are transformed, delivered, and created within intimate relationships.