Prototype‐based assessment of laypeople's views of love

Abstract

Empirical work on love has focused mainly on romantic/passionate love. Recent research suggests that other kinds of love, such as friendship love and familial love, may be more salient to laypeople (Fehr & Russell, 1991). One purpose of this research was to offer a more complete picture of how laypeople conceptualize love by exploring a broad range of types of love. The other major purpose was to develop a methodology for studying laypeople's conceptions of different kinds of love. Four studies were conducted. In Study 1, dating couples were presented with prototypes of 15 different types of love. They were asked to rate how similar the conception of love depicted in each prototype was to their own view of love. Study 2 was a replication of Study 1 with subjects who were not dating one another. In Study 3, the validity of the prototype measures was explored by asking subjects to determine the kind of love depicted in each prototype. Study 4 investigated the relation between the prototypes of love and existing love scales and therefore addressed issues of convergent and discriminant validity. These prototype‐based measures showed considerable promise as valid, reliable instruments for assessing people's views of love. They revealed that laypeople regard friendship love and familial kinds of love as closest to their own view. Passionate kinds of love (e.g., passionate, infatuation, puppy love) received the lowest ratings. The measures also proved useful in elucidating the relation between laypeople's and experts' conceptions of romantic and passionate love.

Cultural Prototypes and Dimensions of Honor

“…Following the methods defined by Fehr (1988Fehr ( , 1994, in Study 1a, we first asked Turkish and Northern American participants of European background to generate all the features of honor they could, using a freeresponse format. Trained coders combined conceptually similar features to create a smaller list of meaningful features.…”

“…question. For example, researchers have investigated prototypical conceptions of love (Fehr, 1994), forgiveness (Kearns & Fincham, 2004), and modesty (Gregg, Hart, Sedikides, & Kumashiro, 2008). The prototype approach has also been used to identify similarities and differences between related constructs, such as love and commitment (Fehr, 1988).…”

On the benefits of valuing being friends for nonmarital romantic partners

“…In several analyses of this type, friendship emerged as a central, defining characteristic of love, broadly defined (Fehr, 1988(Fehr, , 1994Fehr & Russell, 1991), of romantic love, specifically (Regan, Kocan, & Whitlock, 1998), and of romantic relationships (Aron & Westbay, 1996).…”

Love and Intimacy, Psychology of

“…Seeking a breakthrough to the difficulties associated with defining love, Fehr (1994Fehr ( , 2006 resorted to people themselves and their own understanding of the love concept. The love prototype is based on spontaneously elicited features of love as well as on measuring how important these features are to laypersons in cognitively representing the concept.…”