A brief history of social scientists’ attempts to measure passionate love

Abstract

The concept of passionate love has a long history, yet it was not until the 1940s that social scientists created tools designed to measure this emotion. Over the next 60 years, numerous scales of romantic and passionate love were created and tested. Currently, however, there exists no single compendium of existing scales. This paper attempts to fill in the missing information on existing love scales by providing a list of 33 different measures and indicating where each scale’s reliability and validity information can be found. We close by attempting to explain how scholars’ conceptions of the nature of love have changed over the years, and how these historical and scientific changes are reflected in the scales designed to measure passionate love.

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