When people are in a certain mood, whether elation or depression, that mood is often communicated to others. When we are talking to someone who is depressed it may make us feel depressed, whereas if we talk to someone who is feeling self-confident and buoyant we are likely to feel good about ourselves. This phenomenon, known as emotional contagion, is identified here, and compelling evidence for its affect is offered from a variety of disciplines - social and developmental psychology, history, cross-cultural psychology, experimental psychology, and psychopathology.

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Theorists such as Farber argue that in adolescence passionate love first appears in all its intensity. Both adolescence and passion are “intense, overwhelming, passionate, consuming, exciting, and confusing”. As yet, however, clinicians have been given little guidance as to how to deal with adolescents caught up in their passionate feelings. Nor has there been much research into the nature of passionate love. In Section 1 of this paper, we define passionate love, explain the necessity of developing a scale to measure this concept, and review evidence as to the nature of passionate love. In Section 2, we report a series of studies conducted in developing the Passionate Love Scale (the PLS). We present evidence as to the PLS's reliability, validity, and relationship to other factors involved in close relationships. We end by describing how we have used this scale in family therapy to open conversations about the nature of passionate love/companionate love/and intimacy … and discussing profitable directions for subsequent research.

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