Analysis of the Article 'Measurement of Romantic Love' by Zick Rubin

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The article, “Measurement of Romantic Love” written by Zick Rubin, expresses the initial research aimed at presenting and validating the social-psychological construct of romantic love. The author assumed that love should be measured independently from liking. In this research, the romantic love was also conceptualized to three elements: affiliative and depend need, an orientation of exclusiveness and absorption, and finally a predisposition to help.

There were totally three major phases for the research. They are a paper-and-pencil love scale, a questionnaire study of student dating couple and a laboratory experiment.

In order to distinguish the difference between loving and liking, questionnaire should be undergone. Firstly, the love-scale should be set which referred to the association response from the questionnaire. Some questionnaire items had to be provided according to the attitude of the respondents toward the target person. The questionnaire represented the personal visions of two panels of students and faculty about the ideas of love and like. It contained theoretical thinking and pointed to the three elements of love mentioned in paragraph one. The questionnaire items included two categories, like and love and questionnaires were distributed to 158 dating couples at the University of Michigan. The results found that love and like were more strongly related among males than females and it gave some proofs for the suggestion that it was more illustrious for women to differentiate the two emotions than men. The results also showed that women like their male friends more than other side like them. Moreover, women were prone to say love to same-sex friends more than men and those might be some kinds of the gender differe...

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... more experienced or give some training in a bid to avoid careless mistakes during the experiment.

The validity was not enough for the whole research. For the questionnaire part, it is valid at that time. Questionnaire items represented the personal visions of two panels of students and faculty about the ideas of love and like. Those questions were chosen under a serious consideration and related to the concept of love and liking. However, some questions are not suitable to use nowadays and this will be discussed below. For the experiment, it was not valid. The author used the eye contact to assess the couples’ visual behavior but it was not a good measurement. Some mature couple would develop into deeper relationship and have closer contact such as hug. Eye contact may not be a way or necessary for them to communicate but this didn’t mean that they were not close.

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