What is love and why have psychologists undertaken research into it?

Psychological Explanations of Love

What is love and why have psychologists undertaken research into it?

Love is defined as a profound feeling of deep affection for one another. It is thought to be critical in terms of emotional development so psychologists have attempted to distinguish between loving and liking, and the different forms of love, most significantly compassionate and romantic love.

Liking and loving

The most famous attempt to outline differences between liking and loving was created by Rubin, who put forward the Rubin Love Scale and the Rubin Liking Scale. The love scale measured three main components: dependant needs of the other person, feelings of exclusiveness and absorption and desire to assist the other person. Whilst the liking scale seeks to measure respect for the other person’s abilities and similarly of the other person’s attitudes and other characteristics. Rubin consequently found that women tended to like the men more than the men liked the women. Men tended loved in context of a sexual relationship whereas women experienced intimacy and attachment in a wider variety of relationships. However the scales were found to be highly correlated with one another and Sternberg et al pointed out that Rubin’s scales do not discriminate very well between liking and loving.

Romantic and compassionate love

Berscheid and Walster highlighted key contrasts between the two groups of love.

Compassionate love: is liking that involves more depth of feeling and commitment than simply liking an acquaintance. This kind of love develops through mutual rewards, familiarity steady and positive emotions and tends to strengthen over time.
Romantic love: based on intense emotions which often novelty and a mix of emotions (excitement and despair, etc) that become diluted over time.

Sternberg’s triangular theory

Sternberg suggested a triangular theory of love consisting of three factors: intimacy, passion and commitment. ...

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Romantic and compassionate love

Berscheid and Walster highlighted key contrasts between the two groups of love.

Compassionate love: is liking that involves more depth of feeling and commitment than simply liking an acquaintance. This kind of love develops through mutual rewards, familiarity steady and positive emotions and tends to strengthen over time.
Romantic love: based on intense emotions which often novelty and a mix of emotions (excitement and despair, etc) that become diluted over time.

Sternberg’s triangular theory

Sternberg suggested a triangular theory of love consisting of three factors: intimacy, passion and commitment. Furthermore he claimed that there are several kinds of love resulting from a combination of these three groups.

Liking or friendship: intimacy but no passion or commitment.
Romantic love: intimacy and passion, but not commitment.
Compassionate love: intimacy and commitment, but not passion.
Empty love: commitment but no passion or intimacy.
Fatuous love: commitment and passion, but not intimacy.
Infatuated love: involves passion but not intimacy or commitment.
Infatuated love: this is the strongest form of love as it concerns all three elements.

The advantage of this theory is that you can use it to analyse relationships and perceive similarities and differences between partners. This may therefore make partners realise that it may be necessary to adapt to the others needs to make the relationship work. The disadvantage is that the commitment component is too vague and doesn’t specify on what basis an individual decides to love another person.

Three-factor theory of love

This is a controversial approach to understanding love, based on Schachter and Singer’s cognitive labelling theory of emotion that suggests all emotional experiences are the outcome of being in a state of psychological arousal and providing an appropriate label for that arousal. Hatfield and Walster applied this concept of cognitive labelling to love, describing it as a state of physiological arousal. When an appropriate love-object is present and cultural cues teach you that the emotion is love then it is labelled as love. This approach provides a plausible explanation of love and can explain cultural differences, however may only be relevant to experiences of love; for example “love at first sight” (if this really does exist) cannot be explained through this method.