It is proposed that when people give a gift they engage in ‘love accounting, so that they will spend less on it if they include a written expression of love with it. This hypothesis was tested with college students (N = 314). It was found that participants who wrote a love message to accompany a Mother’s Day gift budgeted less for the gift itself than control participants (Experiment 1), and this effect was replicated for a Christmas gift (Experiment 2). The amount of effort expended by the giver on preparing the love message did not account for the effect (Experiment 3). It is concluded that a gift and its accompanying love message are mentally computed as belonging to the same “love account”, implying that consumers’ excessive splurging on gifts might be controlled by writing a love message before gift shopping.

This research focuses on the significant changes that have taken place in the strength of the center parties in Israel. The political system in Israel is a multiparty system, composed of right-wing parties, left-wing parties, center parties, religious parties and ethnic parties. This research does not relate to the religious and ethnic parties, because they are not on the right-to-left spectrum. The research questions: 1What are the factors behind the changes in the strength of the center parties in Israel?2Are the demographic changes that have taken place in Israeli society cause middle class support in the center parties? 3.Is the strengthening of the political center stemmed from the extremism that occurred in the right-wing and left-wing parties? There is controversy amongst the researchers as to the very existence of center parties (Knoller, 2000, 2017; Arian & Shamir, 2004; Hazan, 1999; Smith, 1988).Throughout the 71 years of Israel’s existence there have been 15 center parties. Most of them have been small and have disappeared after one or two Knesset terms. Starting in the early 2000s, the power of the center parties in Israel underwent significant changes, from small parties, they have become large parties that compete for the ability to form a government. 1.The strengthening of the center parties stemmed from the radicalization of both the left and the right 2. The middle class is one of the factors in the strengthening of the center parties. 3. Other factors include the party leadership and the overall platform, which offers every voter the ideology that suits him.