Psychological bond

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A psychological bond is [...]

A personal relationship may result in a psychological bond. Examples include:

Advocates of teams in business organization would have potential team members "bonding" with each other and (especially) with team leaders.

Psychological Bonds, also called Emotional Bonds, are not the same as meeting someone and liking them, sometimes referred to as "bonding."

Bonds form between two individuals in proportion to the amount they communicate. The strength of the bond in each individual is determined by the amount of communication he/she remembers; that is the amount of change that occurs in their brains. Amount means a summation of the number of bits communicated, intensity of emotion they generate and importance attributed to them by the individual. Since individuals vary in the amount they hear, the amount of emotion it generates and the importance they attribute to it, the strength of the bond in each of the two will be different, often just a little, sometimes a lot.

The more bits communicated and the more emotional and important they are the more quickly the bond reaches maximum strength. The strength is independent of the particular emotion provoked. Bonds between enemies can be as strong as the bonds of lovers. Fantasy communications can generate bonds, so it is possible to form bonds to things which don’t actually communicate and normal to have bonds to animal which actually do communicate.

When a bonded object is lost suddenly a grief response is provoked. Grief is the process of accepting the loss, adjusting to the changed situation and allowing the brain changes which constitute the bond to fade away. This usually takes longer than initially developing these changes, commonly two years for bonds of full strength. How the grief process is carried out and associated ideation varies with culture. Where no bond exists no grief occurs to a loss, “Easy come, easy go.”

No conscious awareness of a bond exists as long as a relationship continues at the same or increasing intensity of communication. If the intensity decreases, as when one person takes a business trip, the bonded parties gradually miss each other more as time passes and feel an increasing urge to increase their communication, which is usually possible in normal social circumstances. If this is not possible or if the decrease in communication is very gradual, as when both parties gradually become more preoccupied with separate jobs, the bonds may fade away without it being noticed and eventually the two find the don’t miss each other any more. The grief process has occurred so gradually and unconsciously it wasn’t noticed.