Love and romantic relationships include emotional bonds, attraction, intimacy, desire, partner choice, and long-term partnership. In psychological research, love is usually treated as a multidimensional construct that may involve feelings, beliefs, preferences, motivations, and patterns of closeness.
This domain focuses on instruments that assess love as a feeling, attitude, style, relational ideal, or romantic orientation.
These measures are based on theoretical models that describe the components, forms, or meanings of love. They include early distinctions between love and liking, as well as multidimensional models such as intimacy, passion, and commitment.
The Rubin's Love Scale and Like Scale assess affiliative and attachment-related aspects of love, such as care, need, and exclusivity, in contrast to liking, which reflects respect, admiration, and perceived similarity.
The Love Scale (Pam-Plutchik-Conte) assesses feelings and attitudes associated with being in love and helps distinguish romantic love from dating and friendship.
The Romantic Relationship Scale assesses romantic involvement and feelings toward a partner, including attraction, emotional closeness, and perceived importance of the relationship.
One of the most influential frameworks is Sternberg's triangular theory of love, which conceptualizes love as a combination of intimacy, passion, and commitment.
The Sternberg's Triangular Love Scale (STLS) measures the three components of Sternberg's model: intimacy, passion, and commitment.
The Love Stories Scale extends Sternberg's work through a narrative approach, describing romantic relationships in terms of implicit “stories” or scripts that shape expectations and relationship meanings.
These measures describe relatively stable ways of understanding, idealizing, and approaching romantic relationships. They include love styles, romantic beliefs, romanticism, and general attitudes toward love.
The Love Attitudes Scale (LAS), also known as “Colors of Love,” is based on John Alan Lee's typology of six love styles: Eros, Ludus, Storge, Pragma, Mania, and Agape. It assesses characteristic ways of experiencing and expressing love, reflecting both emotional tendencies and relationship beliefs.
The Romantic Beliefs Scale (RBS) assesses idealized beliefs and expectations about romantic relationships, destiny, and love.
The Love Ways Inventory assesses preferred ways of expressing, communicating, and experiencing love in close relationships.
The Attitudes Toward Love Scale assesses beliefs, values, and evaluative attitudes regarding romantic love and intimate relationships.
The Dean's Romanticism Scale assesses romantic beliefs and idealized attitudes toward love, including views of love as powerful, unique, transformative, and central to personal happiness.
○ The Five Love Languages quiz, based on Gary Chapman's self-help model, explores preferred ways of giving and receiving affection: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch.
○ The Five Apology Languages quiz, based on Gary Chapman and Jennifer Thomas's self-help model, explores preferred ways of giving and receiving apologies, including expressing regret, accepting responsibility, making restitution, genuinely repenting, and requesting forgiveness.
These instruments focus on the emotional intensity and quality of romantic experience. They assess passionate love, infatuation, romantic preoccupation, attachment-like feelings, and caring or compassionate forms of love.
The Passionate Love Scale (PLS) assesses intense romantic feelings, including emotional arousal, intrusive thinking, longing, and idealization of the partner. It is especially relevant for early-stage or highly affective forms of love.
The Compassionate Love Scale (CLS) assesses caring, concern, support, and responsiveness toward another person. In romantic contexts, it captures a more prosocial and other-oriented form of love.
The Infatuation and Attachment Scales (IAS) distinguish between early-stage infatuation and more stable attachment bonds, capturing a related but not identical aspect of close relationships.
These measures assess emotional closeness, perceived interconnectedness, shared relational life, and the subjective sense of being close to another person.
The Miller Social Intimacy Scale (MSIS) assesses the depth and intensity of emotional intimacy in close relationships.
The Personal Assessment of Intimacy in Relationships (PAIR) assesses multiple aspects of intimacy in romantic relationships, including emotional, social, sexual, intellectual, and recreational intimacy.
The Loving Reciprocity Scale (LRS) assesses mutual emotional exchange, reciprocity, and perceived balance of giving and receiving in close relationships.
The Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale (IOS) is a widely used single-item pictorial measure of perceived closeness, capturing the extent to which individuals experience overlap between themselves and their partner.
The Silencing the Self Scale (STSS) assesses self-silencing in close relationships, including suppressing one's feelings and needs to maintain intimacy, externalized self-perception, care as self-sacrifice, and divided self.
These measures focus on how people choose, evaluate, and seek potential romantic partners. They assess partner ideals, mate preferences, dating motives, and perceived abilities involved in initiating or selecting romantic relationships.
The Ideal Partner Rating Scale (IPRS) assesses preferences for qualities of an ideal romantic partner, including traits, values, interpersonal characteristics, and relationship expectations.
The Mating Intelligence Scale assesses self-perceived abilities related to mating-relevant social cognition, courtship, relationship initiation, and mate choice.
⇒ Attachment. Romantic love overlaps with attachment processes, especially the need for closeness, security, dependence, separation, and anxiety about the partner's availability.
⇒ Relationship Dynamics. Love is closely connected with relationship satisfaction, commitment, communication, conflict, intimacy, partner ideals, and long-term couple functioning.
⇒ Relational emotions. Romantic bonds often involve jealousy, trust, suspicion, fear of rejection, longing, and other emotions that arise specifically in close relationships.
⇒ Sexuality. Romantic love may overlap with sexual desire, attraction, sexual satisfaction, and erotic aspects of relationships.
Love-related instruments should be interpreted as measuring different aspects of romantic experience rather than one single construct. Structural models describe components of love, style-based measures describe romantic orientations, intensity scales capture passionate or infatuated states, and partner-preference measures focus on choice and ideals.
These aspects may overlap but should not be treated as interchangeable. A person may report strong romantic passion without long-term commitment, high intimacy without idealization, clear partner preferences without an existing relationship, or romantic beliefs that differ from actual relationship behavior.
A profile-based interpretation helps clarify whether the assessment concerns love as emotion, attitude, style, closeness, partner choice, communication model, or relational ideal.