Are we in love yet? How about now? No? What about now?

Photo: flickr/Quinn DombrowskiAccording to pop psychology, one of the best tools for achieving a goal is monitoring one's progress towards that goal. But what if your goal is to become emotionally close to another person? Can obsessing about how close you feel towards someone interfere with your ability to actually feel close? To test this idea, these scientists had first year undergraduate psychology students talk to each other, and had some of them rate how close they felt every five minutes. It turns out that checking in with their feelings regularly didn't help them feel closer, and in fact, made it worse. Perhaps this is something to keep in mind on a first date.An ironic effect of monitoring closeness. "Most theories of goal pursuit underscore the beneficial consequences of monitoring progress towards goals. However, effects of affect labelling and dissociations between experience and meta-consciousness suggest that monitoring may not always ...