Name Elaine Hatfield Role Psychologist | ||
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Books Love and Sex: Cross‑cul, Darwin's Law, Psychology of Emotion, Recovered Memories, Deadly Wager | ||
Love Code: The Chemistry of Intimacy
Elaine Hatfield (formerly also known as Elaine Walster) is an American social psychologist. She has been credited, alongside Ellen S. Berscheid, as one of the pioneers of relationship science. She is employed as a professor in the psychology department of the University of Hawaii.
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Education
Hatfield received her BA in Psychology and English in 1959 from the University of Michigan and her PhD from Stanford University in 1963.
Career
Relationship science was Hatfield's first professional research focus, beginning at the foundation of her career in the 1960s with an emphasis on human attraction and the nature of romantic love. In addition to Berscheid, she has conducted this research with a number of colleagues, including Leon Festinger, Elliot Aronson, first husband William Walster, whom she met while at Stanford University, Russell D. Clark, and Susan Sprecher. The "Passionate Love Scale" Hatfield and Sprecher developed in 1986 is one of the most widely used in the field.
Hatfield's research in the area has not been without controversy—in 1975, the $84,000 grant she was awarded by the National Science Foundation became the focus of the first Golden Fleece Award for wasteful government spending by then United States Senator William Proxmire. Due to Proxmire's campaign, the funding was rescinded. Undaunted, Hatfield went on to write or co-write many books and papers based on her research, among them A New Look at Love, which won the American Psychological Foundation's National Media Award, and the often-cited Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality article "Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers" (1989).
In the 1990s, Hatfield and current husband, American historian Richard Rapson, began researching emotional contagion: the process by which people's emotions are influenced by the demonstrated emotions of their companions. In the 2000s, she presented alongside Katherine Aumer on the psychology of hate.
Hatfield is a professor of Psychology at the University of Hawai'i and past-president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS). In 2012, the Association for Psychological Science (APS) gave Hatfield the William James award for a Lifetime of Scientific Achievement. In recent years, she has received Distinguished Scientist Awards (for a lifetime of scientific achievement) from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP), from the SSSS, and from the University of Hawai'i, and she has received the Alfred Kinsey Award from the Western Region of SSSS. Two of her books have won the American Psychological Association's National Media Award.
Personal life
Outside of their research, in 1963 Hatfield and Berscheid, then professors at the University of Minnesota, challenged and overcame the University's prohibition against women on faculty dining in the university's Faculty Club. Previously wed to William Walster, she is currently married to Richard Rapson.