Abstract

F. J. Jones – a scientist for literary – analyzed Petrarch’s ‘Sonnets to Laura’ with respect to positive and negative emotions and recognized in the changes between love and despair an oscillating behaviour, which he called Petrarch’s emotional cycle. The mathematician S. Rinaldi investigated this cycle from viewpoint of stability, established a nonlinear ODE model for this oscillating emotions and inspiration.
This contribution makes use of ‘System Dynamics’ – SD - to set up a model for the emotional relations between a couple, first for the couple Laura–Petrarch, and second, for a nowadays couple, by extending the states of the system.
In principle, emotions and inspiration emerge from a source, and are fading into a sink – best suited for the SD modelling paradigm. The rate variables and the controlling parameters for increase and decrease of emotions create a broad variety of emotional behaviour and of degree of inspiration, and require nonlinear approaches for driving forces for the emotions, especially in the feedback between Laura and Petrarch (in SD nonlinear auxiliary variables).
Using Jones’ emotional cycle as data, parameters in the ‘Laura-Petrarch Model’ can be identified. Interestingly, again the poems help determining at least the qualitative size of some parameters. Changes some of these historic parameters describe nice case studies: Laura’s emotions are fading faster, or positive appeal of Petrarch changes emotion behaviour qualitatively.
The Laura-Petrarch SD model allows to develop a ‘Nowa-days Couple Model’ by extending states in the SD model (taking into account the equality of woman and man nowa-days). The historic parameters from the ‘Laura-Petrarch Model’ can be used as basis for parameters in the ‘Nowa-days Couple’ SD model,  – allowing some nice simulation experiments for the development of emotions, from ecstatic up and down to never-ending languidness, from attraction to denial, from natural course to course intervention by aesthetic surgery.