AINT LOVE GRAND - A PROTOTYPE ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPT OF ROMANTIC LOVE

We conducted a prototype analysis to explore men's and women's cogniti ons (knowledge and beliefs) about the nature of romantic love. In stud y 1 (compilation of prototypic features), participants listed the feat ures of romantic love in a free response format. The most commonly gen erated characteristics were trust, sexual attraction/desire and accept ance/tolerance. In study 2 (centrality ratings), participants provided centrality ratings for the study 1 features. As before, central featu res included trust, honesty and sexual attraction/desire; peripheral f eatures included submission/obedience, deception/lies and depression. In study 3 (memory tasks), participants read statements that used an e qual mix of central and peripheral features to describe a relationship between two individuals, engaged in an interference task, and were as ked to recognize and recall the original statements. As expected, part icipants falsely recognized and incorrectly recalled a greater number of central than peripheral features. Correlational analyses revealed t hat the number of times a feature was incorrectly recognized was posit ively associated with both its frequency and its centrality. These res ults support the hypothesis that the concept of romantic love is proto typically organized (i.e. has an internal structure), and that sexual desire is one of the central features of this concept.