Hendrick and Hendrick state, "These theories appear to have considerable overlap, but they also deal with different phenomena as well. Modest claims of one theory's superiority over another are beginning to appear, suggesting the fruitfulness of comparison to determine commonalities and differences."
To compare the above theories, Hendrick and Hendrick surveyed 424 undergraduate students at a large southwestern university during the fall semester of 1987. After dropouts, the remaining sample consisted of 391 unmarried undergraduate students (189 men, 202 women), and representative of a somewhat affluent, white, middle-class student population. The researchers measured each of the approaches noted above through specially designed scales. They found an overall problem not particularly with Sternberg's approach, but with current love research in general like his: That is that Scale similarities and differences may be fascinating to scaling researchers, but often are of little consequence to anyone else.... Our answer is that if we ever hope to enlarge our understanding of the complex phenomenon called love, we must attempt the clearest possible conceptualizations about love, as well as the clearest possible approaches to assessing those conceptualizations. To provide either theory or data regarding love is to provide a necessary but not sufficient condition for the generation of knowledge. Both conditions are required.
Hendrick and Hendrick's study indicated that although there are both theory and assessment devices in all these approaches, they are not linked tightly enough. Hazen and Shaver proposed that adult tendencies toward love are based on attachment formed in infancy and childhood. The three items developed to describe adult love styles are heavily oriented toward intimacy and trust. They may capture the "closeness" aspect of relationship love, but they lack the passion and communication themes that also comprise love. Most likely, attachment styles are the foundation of interpersonal relationships, changed and refined by personality and by life experiences. Future research on attachment and love will probably need to use multiple measures to better capture the complexity of adult life.
Hatfield, who believes in the consummate importance of passionate love, has developed a solid scale to measure it. Although the researchers believe she has captured relatively more "manic" elements of passionate love and relatively misses some of the secure ego-based elements, as expressed in Eros, her scale is nevertheless a broad-ranging measure of the important construct of passionate love. Meanwhile, states Hendrick and Hendrick, "
Sternberg has developed a theoretical approach using passion, intimacy, and commitment as the ingredients of all types of love, and his theory is well articulated and conceptually compelling. Although his 'triangular theory' of loving and liking is a knitted, integrative theory that combines aspects of past theories and the mechanisms underlying them, and may serve at least as well as any other framework currently available," the Triangular Theory of Love Scale does not yet appear to be adequate to measure his components independently and thus begin to validate the theory."
Davis's Relationship Rating Form is meant to measure more than just love, and has the strength of being applicable to both friendships and romantic relationships. At the present time, this scale is not a clear measure, and more item development is needed. Finally, Hendrick and Hendrick say about their own study on love: "Our own approach to the measurement of love is not without problems. Although the Love Attitudes Scale performed well psychometrically, it has been criticized for not measuring love at all, but rather some combination of love constructs and nonlove constructs. Such criticism is worth serious consideration." Clearly, they feel that "Love is simply too unruly to be categorized so easily. It means different things to different people in different relationships at different points in time. Only with patient, open-minded exploration of several of the current approaches to love will we have any possibility of developing the overarching theory of love that still eludes us."
Sternberg's triangular theory of love has also been criticized for its methodology and on the grounds that passion, intimacy, and commitment often overlap. One study, for example, found that the triangular theory classification "is meaningfully related to individuals' similarity judgments" but that data did not provide strong support for the triangular theory (Hassebrauck and Buhl 1996).
Not all researchers have had negative findings with Sternberg's triangular, however. Lemieux tested the assumptions in the Triangular Theory of Love about changes in intimacy,...
Both of these focus on the categories of Eros, Storge and Ludus. Eros refers to a type of passionate love. Storge is the opposite of eros, and is more of a companionate love, or strong friendship and is more likely to develop in communities where choice of partner is not high and where marrying for love is not common. Ludus is the final type of love and refers to
They were not informed of the reason for the code. They were asked "(a) How similar do you think this person is to you? (1 _ not at all similar to 11 _ very similar) and (b) How much do you think this person will like you? (1 _ not at all to 11 _ very much)" and other like preliminary questions to see if subliminal likes were noticed
Interview No. 3 - "Bill" (age 54 years): The interview with Bill took place immediately following the conclusion of the interview with Anne who left the dining room after being thanked for her participation and the refreshments. Bill is a semi-retired disabled veteran of the U.S. Air Force with Vietnam-era service; he continues to work part-time as a pizza delivery driver. Because the couple's ownership of a shared computer with high-speed
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now