Enacted love: Capitalization responses signal love, including toward strangers

What behavior is seen as "love" and why does it matter? We theorize active-constructive responding to another's disclosure of good news is prototypical "enacted love" and test hypotheses about implications for a loving person's relationship development. We use three distinct methods-dyadic interactions between romantic couples (Study 1, N = 160), real spontaneous responses to a stranger's good news (Study 2, N = 204), and observation of others' real capitalization responses to a stranger's good news (Studies 3-5, N = 97, 105, and 402, respectively)-to assess convergent and discriminant evidence for the construct. Study 2 uses experience sampling to track the development of capitalization respondents' social lives over time. Studies 4 and 5 use within-subjects experiments to test hypotheses that loving behavior could influence others' interactions with loving people. Results have theoretical implications for close relationships and the concept of "loving one's neighbor," plus practical implications for building bridges in a divided society. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).