Elaine Hatfield

Who is Elaine Hatfield?

Elaine Hatfield is a professor of Psychology at the University of Hawaiʻi. She is notable as the scholar who pioneered the scientific study of passionate love and sexual desire. In 2012, the Association for Psychological Science gave Hatfield the William James Award for a Lifetime of Scientific Achievement. In recent years she has received Distinguished Scientist Awards from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, and the University of Hawaiʻi, and the Alfred Kinsey Award from the Western Region of SSSS. Between 1970 and 1990, she was ranked in citation reviews as the most frequently quoted social psychologist in the world. She has often appeared on national T.V., interviewed by Barbara Walters, Phil Donahue, Hugh Downs, Tom Snyder, and others, and has written many books on her research, among them two books which both won the American Psychological Foundation's National Media Award: A New Look at Love and Mirror, Mirror: The Importance of Looks in Everyday Life.

Recently, Hatfield and Dr Richard L. Rapson have collaborated on three books: Love, Sex, and Intimacy: Their Psychology, Biology, and History Emotional Contagion and Love and Sex: Cross-Cultural Perspectives