The historical psychology of romantic love in Persia in the very long run (900 - 1920)

Previous research has highlighted a historical rise in the prominence of romantic love, as reflected in literary fiction across various cultures. In this study, we examined this trend within Persian literature, distinguished by its remarkable continuity and renowned medieval works. Utilizing a newly developed database of Persian narratives spanning from the 10th century to the early 20th century CE, we quantified the significance of love in these stories using GPT language models. We validated our methodology through three procedures: using a dataset of Iranian movies (N = 3532), comparing GPT's scores with labels provided by Persian literary scholars, and comparing those with human annotations. We conducted analysis on a corpus of Persian stories (N = 4662). Our findings reveal an increasing emphasis on romantic love over time, with evidence suggesting that economic development may have influenced preferences for love themes, particularly during the Safavid era (1501–1736). These results invite future research to investigate whether this trend reflects broader psychological shifts associated with modernization.