Ｑ39.What is infatuation?

Ａ.Infatuation is an attitude for selecting a partner to raise offspring.<br>
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　　Infatuation is an attitude that branches out when the situation causes interest to combined with sexual instinct, which is developed by sexual selection.<br>
　　Infatuation and love belong to different groups. Infatuation can be the beginning of love, but they don't have a direct relation.<br>
　　An example which makes it easy to understand that infatuation is not love is stalkers. Stalking behaviors are a kind of hunting behavior resulting from interest.<br>
　　Infatuation is a variation of interest, so it makes you want to learn about someone like interest. Infatuation always needs novelty, therefore anthropologist Helen Fisher said love as in infatuation cools down after about four years. Some couples will separate if they don't feel love at this time.<br>
　　Infatuation makes one want to be with the person one likes. The perception connected to that person is pleasant, so one wants to approach that person to see them more.<br>
　　If one is infatuated one's feelings become like a child's. One's viewpoint changes, many things seem fresh, and one loses objectivity. One's vision becomes narrow and focused on the things related to the infatuation. One becomes indifferent to other things.<br>
　　One starts to imagine that person all the time. That person becomes idealized and one feels that that person is needed, which drives one's infatuation's actions. Every emotional up and down gets larger.<br>
　　The value of infatuation goes without saying. It is indispensable for animals with genders.<br>
　　Infatuation has special facial expressions too. Such as looking moonstruck, ogling, and a big continuous smile. This expression is a signal of willingness to help that the object of infatuation.<br>
　　 Infatuation can be difined as an emotion to select a partner, so animals that reproduce sexually likely feel infatuation. For example, horses, cows and sheep display flehmen, which means that they raise their head, stretch out their neck, and curl their upper lip. This behavior is thought to be an expression of infatuation. Courting dances seen among birds are also a display of infatuation.<br>
　　Most birds select a partner based on memories from when they were chicks. For example, a male zebra finch was reared for a while with a common finch after hatching. After that the male zebra finch became an adult and mated with a female zebra finch. However, when a female common finch appeared, the male zebra finch went to mate with it.<br>
　　As a rule, the intensity of infatuation is proportionate to the difficulty of raising offspring. Animals which have difficulty raising offspring show strong infatuation. The cooperation between a male and female is important for them, therefore they need to select a partner carefully.<br>
　　Infatuation occurs when one meets an ideal partner. Of course like the saying, "every one has their own tastes," shows, it is a personal judgement. From the genetic viewpoint, we prefer a partner that is similar to ourselves by the principle of kin selection, but it is dangerous for closely related individuals to be wedded, so we don't like those that are too similar to us. Researchers speculate that this is why we don't feel infatuation for members of the other sex that we grew up with.<br>
　　Considered rationally, attraction should ideally be based on the ability to make up for the weakness of each other, but this is actually rare. Researchers only found the tendency for a talkative person and a good listener to be coupled.<br>
　　Love at first sight is thought to be formed on a single aspect such as eyes, voice, gestures, and so on. It is an unconscious choice in which one is strongly attracted to one element of another, so we sometimes cannot say why we like that person. This is because the emotional memory of infatuation is connected to that one element.<br>
　　 In other words, when experiencing love at first sight, the element of the person one falls in love with is similar to someone in one's memory, it is thought that they have seen some attractive signal in that person's smile, or sad look on their face.<br>
　　Those memories are broken down and then reorganized. Episode memory is not yet developed in small children, therefore those past experiences become emotional memories of infatuation, which are formed based on one piece of information connected to emotion.<br>
　　The factors that make one a universally ideal partner are good health, or ability to make a living, and so on. These factors which need rational calculations are irrelevant to infatuation because it is an unconscious selection. The state of health is judged by figure or style, not a clinical chart or medical history; the ability to make a living is judged by stability of their voice or how intelligible they are, not by actual income.