PROTOTYPE-BASED ASSESSMENT OF LAYPEOPLES VIEWS OF LOVE

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 & Russ ell, 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 methodolog y for studying laypeople's conceptions of different kinds of love. Fou r studies were conducted. In Study 1, dating couples were presented wi th prototypes of 15 different types of love. They were asked to rate h ow similar the conception of love depicted in each prototype was to th eir own view of love. Study 2 was a replication of Study 1 with subjec ts who were not dating one another. In Study 3, the validity of the pr ototype 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 protot ype-based measures showed considerable promise as valid, reliable inst ruments for assessing people's views of love. They revealed that laype ople regard friendship love and familial kinds of love as closest to t heir own view. Passionate kinds of love (e.g., passionate, infatuation , puppy love) received the lowest ratings. The measures also proved us eful in elucidating the relation between laypeople's and experts' conc eptions of romantic and passionate love.