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Cultural conformity in psychological constructs has been shown to play a critical role in people’s health and well-being. The more people’s individual beliefs about a construct aligns with the cultural norms, their cultural identity is more cultivated, leading to higher levels of well-being. Considering feeling loved in everyday contexts as a social construct that people indicate shared beliefs and cultural consensus for, in the current study, we explored congruency in cultural beliefs on love and its association with well-being in the United States. 495 participants in the United States evaluated everyday life scenarios in terms of whether they elicit loving feelings or not. We examined the correspondence between people’s beliefs about what makes themselves (i.e., self) feel loved compared to what they think makes others feel loved and the cultural consensus on indicators of love. We then explored how individual differences in these correspondence measures are associated with people’s well-being. We reported evidence for the lack as well as for the existence of these associations using Bayes Factors in the Bayesian statistical framework. Results indicated that both self-other and self-consensus agreements are meaningfully associated with individuals’ well-being. Furthermore, when examining disagreements in self vs. other ratings of love, we found that one type of disagreement (believing other people feel loved in scenarios that I don’t), is associated with lower levels of well-being. This meaningful relationship to well-being was not visible in the case where a person would report feeling loved in a scenario while believing that others would not. Implications for well-being interventions are further discussed.

Humans are innately social, and this disposition motivates us to build relationships. In particular, close relationships such as romantic love relationships and friendships have a unique bidirectional influence on development. These close relationships influence individuals’ overall well-being in addition to giving purpose and meaning to people’s lives. They also have implications for the development of identity, promoting better mental health, and increasing life satisfaction. Love and friendships are unique in their voluntary and bidirectional nature, and it is this very nature that puts them into the spotlight of interest and makes them prone to change across the lifespan. In the earliest stages of life, the most significant relationships are those with caregivers, although such relationships lay the groundwork for future non-familial relationships. As children begin going to school and interacting with people outside of the home, social connections expand to include friendships during childhood and adolescence. While peer relations teach children and adolescents many of the social skills that are required to maintain close relationships later in life, love relationships, which tend to emerge in adolescence, also contribute to their development and cognitions about social bonds. Love relationships gain a great deal of importance in young adulthood, as young adults strive for intimacy and strong social support. As individuals grow older, they tend to be more selective about the people they spend time with; consequently, middle-aged and older adults’ social circles reduce to the most meaningful connections. These patterns in close relationships provide a deeper understanding of how social connections influence development and, conversely, how development influences social connections.

This study explored the design and implementation of the Cover-up and Un-cover games, two manipulative-based fraction games, in 14 fifth-grade classrooms. We examined how the fraction concepts were integrated into the game design and explored the nature of teacher-student interactions during games using lesson videos. Our examination showed that interactions focused on game progress, rules, and turn taking with little exploration of strategies or the underlying mathematics. To compare the quality of teacher-student interactions during games with interaction quality during other instructional activities, we coded 5 videotaped lessons from each of the 14 classrooms. Statistical results from a dependent t test indicated that teacher-student interactions were of statistically significant lower quality during games than during non-game segments with similar instructional purpose. Teachers might benefit from additional curriculum support and training to implement games as rich mathematical learning opportunities.

Everyday life presents many experiences that can make people feel connected to another and leave them feeling loved. We conducted two ecological momentary assessment studies (N = 52 and N = 160) to examine people's subjective perceptions of the impact of these experiences by capturing the extent to which they felt loved at several randomly sampled times during their daily life. Individual differences in loving feelings were characterized by baseline levels, within-person variabilities, and slow and fast time scale indicators of change. Results showed that there were considerable individual differences in these characteristics and these individual differences related systematically to both psychological well-being and personality: across two studies, higher felt love baseline levels were related to greater psychological well-being as well as to higher Extraversion personality scores, while people scoring high on Neuroticism showed lower baseline levels.