LOVE - An assessment of psychological research into the concept of 'love' over the past five years

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LOVE - An assessment of psychological research into the concept of 'love' over the past five years

Even as far back as the times of Plato there has been a great deal of debate surrounding the question of the nature and existence of love in all its varying forms. Vast arrays of people, from the philosophers of Ancient Greece to the Catholic Church, from Shakespeare to 20th century feminist writers have tried to explore and define the nature of love; and more specific to this essay the concept of what we know today as romantic love. From all this research and philosophising only one thing is clear - the extreme difficulty of the task in hand. Interest in the subject has intensified if anything this century with Freud (1922) suggesting that all emotion was rooted in the desire for sexual union. Watson (1924) defined love as 'an innate emotion elicited by cutaneous stimulation of the erogenous zones.' Some thirty years later Fromm (1956) defined it as 'a device to reduce ones own feelings of isolation and loneliness' whilst Lasswell and Lasswell (1976) defined love in terms of affect, physiological arousal and cognition. Skolnick (1978) offered an even broader definition - 'a constructed experience built with feelings, ideas and cultural symbols.' It is difficult to imagine any concept in psychology to which these definitions do not at least partially apply.

The last 5 years have seen still more investigations into our concept of romantic or other love, and the direction of research we will concentrate on here will be mainly that of how our concepts and expectations of love may affect our experience of it.

Any research into the concept of love is undoubtedly hampered by the subjective nature of the topic being investigated and of the researchers themselves. Hendrick and Hendrick (1988) acknowledged this and they decided to investigate the psychometric properties of several so-called measures of love. These included

i) The Love Attitudes Scale

ii)The Triangular Theory of Love Scale

iii)The Passionate Love Scale

iv)The Relationship Rating Form.

They wanted to know if there were themes common to them all and how far the results obtained from them correlated They did find positive relations between Hatfield's Passionate Love Scale and Sternberg and Davis's passion subscale and also between Agape and Davis's Caring subscale. However it must be remembered that a large proportion of subjects that have been used in any recent studies of these type have been U.S. college students who tend to be white, middle-class, unmarried

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and from relatively affluent backgrounds. Therefore we must consider the possibility that these tests may only accurately reflect their notions of romantic love. What then of individuals from different cultural and sociological backgrounds? Hatfield and Sprecher (1986) acknowledged this problem in their Passionate Love Scale when they listed their objectives as being in exploring the universality of love across different cultures, age gaps and gender variances. However the point being made by Hendrick and Hendrick (1988) was that as we were unsure of the nature of love itself we could not be certain what implications our construal of love would ...

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