Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-1996

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

Psychology

Major Professor

Warren H. Jones

Committee Members

John W. Lounsbury, Cheryl Travis

Abstract

The present study addressed the frequently invoked distinction between passionate and companionate love as proposed by Walster and Walster (1978), using The Love Attitudes Scale (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1986) as a surrogate measure for both kinds of love. The Love Attitudes Scale (LAS) measures Lee's (1976) six love styles; three of these love styles, Eros (passionate love), Ludus (game-playing love), and Mania (manic love), represented Walster and Walster's (1978) passionate love, whereas the remaining love styles, Storge (friendship love). Pragma (practical love), and Agape (selfless love), represented companionate love as conceptualized by these authors. The LAS was administered to 276 (64 male and 191 female) undergraduate students, and was compared to other measures of commitment, trust, life and relational satisfaction, guilt, and loneliness as a means of exploring the ostensible difference between passionate and companionate love and of further explicating the nature of companionate love. Results of correlational analyses raised questions regarding the utility of the distinction, as there was considerable overlap among one of the companionate love styles and three of the passionate love styles. Also, similar correlates emerged between the relational measures and one passionate and one companionate love scale; thus, current conceptualizations of two distinct kinds of love were not supported by the data.

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