Expressing love may lead to increased feelings of being loved, which can have downstream effects on people's senses of fulfillment and wellbeing. Zita Oravecz and colleagues from Pennsylvania State University, U.S., present these findings in a study published July 2, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One from a survey tracking feelings and acts of love over time.
Love is usually not grand gestures. More often, people experience love as smaller and more regular acts. This is the basis of a psychological theory called "positivity resonance," which considers how the small, everyday acts of love create and strengthen connections. These acts can generally be divided into two categories: giving love and receiving love, and the researchers aimed to study how these types of love influence each other over time.
Over a period of four weeks, 52 participants received prompts sent six times a day asking about their experiences of love in that moment. The participants responded on a scale of 0 to 100 for each question about how much they felt loved and how much they expressed love since the last survey. The researchers analyzed the variations in these responses over time.
The researchers found that when people express love to others, they then tend to feel more loved themselves. However, people who received love were not more likely to then express love. The researchers noted that feelings of being loved tended to persist longer than feelings of expressing love. These sorts of differences may influence how people benefit from the experience of love, such as with improved psychological wellbeing and health.
The researchers also surveyed the participants' general happiness and asked them about whether they considered themselves to be flourishing in their lives. Participants who felt loved were more likely to rate themselves as flourishing.
The findings point to potential psychological interventions, encouraging people to express love so that they feel more loved.
The authors add: "Let's spread more love in the world by expressing love throughout our daily lives."
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/3HEkRri
Citation: Williams L, Kim SH, Li Y, Heshmati S, Vandekerckhove J, Roeser RW, et al. (2025) How much we express love predicts how much we feel loved in daily life. PLoS One 20(7): e0323326. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0323326
Author countries: U.S.
Funding: Support for this work was provided by grant #48192 from the John Templeton Foundation (ZO, SH, JV) and the Edna Bennett Pierce Endowed Chair in Caring and Compassion at Penn State (RR). The sponsors or funders did not play any role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. https://www.templeton.org/ https://prevention.psu.edu/peace/people/
