Measurement of romantic love.

Abstract

This study reports Ihc initial results of an attempt to introduce and validate a social-psychological construct oi " romantic love. Starting with the assumption that love is an interpersonal attitude, an internally consistent papcr-and-pencil love scale was developed. The conception of romantic love included three com-ponents: affiliative and dependent need, a predisposition to help, and an orienta-tion of exclusiveness and absorption. Love-scale scores were only moderately correlated with scores on a parallel scale of "liking, " which reflected a more traditional conception of interpersonal attraction. The validity of the love scale was assessed in a questionnaire study and a laboratory experiment. On the basis of the emerging conception of love, it was predicted that college dating couples who loved each other a great deal (as categorized by their love-scale scores) would spend more time gazing into one another's eyes than would couples who loved each other to a lesser degree. The prediction was confirmed. Love is generally regarded to be the deep-est and most meaningful of sentiments. It has occupied a preeminent position in the art and literature of every age, and it is presum-ably experienced, at least occasionally, by the vast majority of people. In Western culture, moreover, the association between love and marriage gives it a unique status as a link between the individual and the structure of society. In view of these considerations, it is sur-prising to discover that social psychologists have devoted virtually no attention to love. Although interpersonal attraction has been a major focus of social-psychological theory and research, workers in this area have not at-tempted to conceptualize love as an inde-pendent entity. For Heider (1958), for ex-ample, "loving " is merely intense liking— there is no discussion of possible qualitative 1 This report is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Michigan. The re-search was supported by a prccloctoral fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health and by a grant-in-aid from the Society for the Psycho-