Psychological well-being and personality traits are associated with experiencing love in everyday life

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.