They’ve dominated the popular music charts for decades – those soulful, sometimes playful, ditties about love, affection, and heartbreak that have just the right catchy melody to keep you humming the song hours, if not days, later.

You know the ones. Tony Orlando & Dawn’s “Knock Three Times;” “Still the One,” by Orleans; Ruport Holmes’ “Escape (the Pina Colada Song).” Good and bad. (Think Captain & Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.”) Painful and bittersweet. (Think Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself.”) The list goes “On and On” – which just happens to be another love song that made Stephen Bishop a lot of money in the late 1970’s.

Paul McCartney immortalized the genre with his own popular classic “Silly Love Songs.”

But why do we find these songs so appealing?

Ross Buck, a UConn professor of communication sciences and psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has a theory. He believes the popularity of love songs goes far beyond the lyrics and notes of a particular tune. Love songs resonate at a deeper level within us, he suggests. They allow us to explore and learn about our inner emotions in a safe and structured way. And that, he says, can be a good thing.

Buck calls it “emotional education,” and he says media, including love songs silly or otherwise, play an important part.

When we explore things in the physical world Buck says, we rely on social feedback from others to discern what something is and what it isn’t, what behavior is socially acceptable and what is not. That is not true with our emotions, Buck says. Deep inner emotions – like love, desire, rejection, or bereavement – can be difficult to share directly with others; and the direct expression of such feelings can be, at times, inappropriate or embarrassing.

“There’s a difference in that we can both agree that the box over there is blue for example and we have equal access to the ‘blueness’ of the box,” Buck says. “But we don’t have equal access to emotions and feelings. I know how I feel, but I don’t know how you feel.”

Love songs, Buck says, help us understand and deal with our emotions and feelings associated with attachment and bonding, and also rejection and loss.

“Just as we learn about dealing with angry or sexual feelings using media, we also learn how to deal with loving and caring feelings,” says Buck. “We learn about losing love, unrequited love – the whole gamut of relationships is explored through different kinds of silly love songs …. You’re connecting with your feelings but you’re not exposing yourself, you’re not really doing anything. It’s all in your head.”

In the 1980’s, Buck and his students explored emotional education by recording individuals’ responses to a series of music videos. Four of the videos were silly love songs: Lionel Ritchie’s “All Night Long,” the Eric Martin Band’s “Don’t Stop,” Linda Ronstadt’s “What’s New,” and ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man.” The videos had clear appeal to the study participants. With a much darker video, the Rolling Stones’ “Under Cover of the Night,” liking was correlated with ratings of power among some participants. Liking an anti-war video, “Fields of Fire” by Big Country, was correlated with feelings of sadness, fear, and anger. Some individuals, particularly males, enjoyed the video because it made them sad, angry, and afraid.

“This is fascinating to me, this feeling of negative emotion and liking it,” Buck says. “It’s why, I think, people go to horror movies or sad movies like Titanic – they want to explore their feelings of fear and uncertainty and all that.”

Exploring and communicating is the key to emotional education, says Buck who has written extensively on the subject and continues the discussion in his periodic blog, Spontaneous Emotion, in Psychology Today.

Buck explains the importance this way: Imagine a little boy playing with blocks gets frustrated and throws a block. His parent tells him that he is frustrated and angry, that he shouldn’t throw blocks, and that he should go to his room and relax for a while. Now the boy knows this feeling he is feeling. The parent has given it a label and taught him how to deal with it, Buck says.

Now imagine that it is a little girl playing with blocks who gets frustrated and throws a block. Only this time, her parent scolds her for being a “bad girl” for throwing the block, but does not take the time to explain frustration to her and how she should handle it. The girl, Buck says, may not develop the same ability to label that particular feeling as the boy and that may cause problems down the road.

“It’s very important that we learn to actually label our feelings and desires and not suppress them, but accurately show them, like anger for example,” says Buck, “and that we learn to do it in an appropriate way.”

There’s nothing silly about that.

Still on the subject – here is a short list of some of the more creative love and break-up songs to be found on the Internet:

1. You’re the Reason Our Kids Are So Ugly
2. I Keep Forgettin’ I Forgot About You
3. I Still Miss You Baby, But My Aim’s Gettin’ Better
4. I’m So Miserable Without You, It’s like Having You Here
5. If You Want to Keep Your Beer Ice Cold (Set it Next to my Ex-Wife’s Heart)

And there are also these memorable classics:

1. Breaking Up is Hard To Do (Neil Sedaka)
2. Usta Be My Girl (O’Jays)
3. Ain’t No Sunshine (Bill Withers)
4. Hurt So Bad (Linda Ronstadt)
5. 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover (Paul Simon)
6. These Boots Are Made for Walking (Nancy Sinatra)
7. She’s Gone (Hall and Oates)
8. Love Stinks (J. Geils Band)
9. Mr. Lonely (Bobby Vinton)
10. Yesterday (the Beatles)
11. Heartbreak Hotel (Elvis Presley)
12. I’m Not in Love (10cc)
13. It’s Too Late (Carole King)
14. It’s All Over Now (Rolling Stones)