Measuring love
Quantifying the experience of romantic love.
In a conversation with a friend the other day, I was intrigued to discover that for her, love is when you “can’t imagine life without them”. I don’t believe I’ve ever met someone I couldn’t imagine living on without — parents, boyfriend, friends and cat all considered. Maybe I’ve never loved. Or, as I’m more inclined to think, my friend and I differ in how we conceptualize and measure love.
Researchers have developed a variety of self-report questionnaires to quantify the experience of romantic love. The earliest empirical measurement of love is accredited to Zick Rubin (1970) who developed an 80-item questionnaire that differentiated between feelings of “liking” and “loving”. Participants are asked to complete the test with either a good friend or significant other in mind; in principle, good friends score higher on the “liking” scale while significant others score higher on the “loving” scale. Through his research, Rubin identified many characteristics that distinguished between varying degrees of romantic love. For instance, participants who scored high on the “loving” scale gazed into each other’s eyes longer than participants who scored poorly.
Another way to look at love, according to John Lee (1973), is to divide love into “styles” — or one’s attitude towards love. The Love Attitude Scale (LAS) developed by Hendricks & Hendricks (1986) is designed to measure one’s particular “style”. In this study, many significant correlations were found between style and variables such as gender, ethnicity and self-esteem. For instance, in a sample of undergraduate students, males were significantly more ludic than females while females were significantly more storgic, pragmatic and manic.
Love has also been posited to fit into an interacting triangle of sorts anchored by three tenets: intimacy, commitment, and passion. The Triangular Love Scale developed by Robert Sternberg (1986), aims to measure the strength of each component in a relationship. According to the author, the amount of love one experiences depends on the strength of the three components while the type of love experienced depends on their strengths relative to each other.
The quest to quantify love does not end here: new research highlights the applicability of physiological assays in the quantification of love. For instance, neuroimaging studies by Bartels & Zeki (2000, 2004) suggest that both romantic love and maternal love are associated with activation in the reward centers of the brain.
In summary, love is a multifaceted thing. How we quantify love appears equally so.
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References
Bartels, A., & Zeki, S. (2000). The neural basis of romantic love. NeuroReport, 11, 3829–3834.
Bartels, A., & Zeki, S. (2004). The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love. NeuroImage, 21, 1155–1166.
Graham, James M. “Measuring love in romantic relationships: A meta-analysis.”Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (2010): 0265407510389126.
Hendrick, C., & Hendrick S. S. (1986). A theory and method of love. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 392–402.
Lee, J. A. (1973). The colors of love: An exploration of ways of loving. Don Mills, Ontario: New Press.
Rubin, Z. (1970). Measurement of romantic love. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 16, 265–273.
Sternberg, R. J. (1986). A triangular theory of love. Psychological Review, 93, 119–135.
