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DOCUMENT RESUME ED 386 676 CG^026 AUTHOR Arnold, Margery E.; Thompson, Bruce TITLE Love Style Perceptions in Relation to PersonalityFunction: Implications for Counseling and PUB DATE Assessment.Nov 95 NOTE 25p.; Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Mid-South Educational Research Association (Biloxi, MS, November 9, 1995). PUB TYPE Reports - Research/Technical (143) -- Speeches/Conference Papers (150) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC01 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Attitude Measures; Counseling; Evaluation; *Love; IDENTIFIERS *Personality; Social Cognition; Validity *ClinicalHendrick Multiaxial InventoryHendrick^ Love^ Attitudes^ Scale;^ Millon ABSTRACT Issues involving love often arise in counseling, because love is so fundamental to the experience of our humanity. But theories of love and related assessments are only at a primitive stage of development. The present study explored the construct validity of scores on a popular measure of love styles, by examining relationships between love styles and scores on a measure of personality dysfunction. Data was collected from 144 graduate and undergraduate students who completed the Hendrick - Hendrick Love Attitudes Scale and the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-II. Results suggest that the Lovesubjects' perception of love style may be construct valid. Results Attitudes Scale used to score the also indicate that counselors must possess an understanding of love, if they are to facilitate the healthy functioning of their clients. Also included in this document are tables and appendices that display the results of the subjects scores of love style perception. Contains 28 references. (Author/SR)
lovems95.wp1 10/20/
LOVE STYLE PERCEPTIONS IN RELATION TO PERSONALITY FUNCTION:
IMPLICATIONS FOR COUNSELING AND ASSESSMENT
Margery E. Arnold Texas A&M University
Bruce Thompson Texas A&M University 77843- and Baylor College of Medicine
RUNNING HEAD: Love Styles
Educational Research Association, Biloxi, MS, November 9, 1995.^ Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Mid-South We appreciate the assistance of Tammi Vacha-Haase, Kavita Murthy, Andrea Rotzein, and Steve Sivo in collecting these data.
Love is among the most fundamental aspects of the experience of being human, and thus frequently becomes an issue during counseling. Freud (1924) himself decades ago argued that, "A strong ego is protection against disease, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill, and we must fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love" (p. 42). Similarly, Sternberg and Grajek (1984) noted that Love can be among the most intense of human emotions, and is certainly one of the most sought after. People have been known to lie, cheat, steal, and even kill in its name, yet no one knows quite what it is. (p. 320) The nature of love also interests persons other than academics, counselors, and counselors' clients, if the popular press is any
indication (cf. "Finding Out", 1992; Gray, 1993).
Unfortunately, previous empirical research has provided counselors with little empirical basis for either understanding or assessing love phenomena, because historically researchers have presumed that love is too mysterious and too intangible for scientific study (Wrightsman & Deaux, 1981). However, more recently love has again become respectable as an area of study (C. Hendrick & S. Hendrick, 1986). Work by Rubin (1984) and by Tennov (1979) illustrates efforts to develop science in this area of inquiry. Two distinct traditions have emerged in contemporary research regarding love phenomena, as summarized by Thompson and Borrello
(1992a). The first series of studies is inductive^ and^ includes
attempts to generate new theory about the nature of love. The second series of studies was of interest in the present inquiry; this series involves the deductively -grounded^ work^ (Borrello & Thompson, 1990a, 1990b; C. Hendrick & S. Hendrick, 1989; S. Hendrick & C. Hendrick, 1987a, 1987b; Murthy, Rotzein & Vacha- Haase, in press; Rotzien, Vacha-Haase, Murthy, Davenport, & Thompson, 1994; Thompson & Borrello, 1987, 1992b) that invokes a theoretical typology of love styles. These studies have employed one of the versions of the Love Attitudes Scale developed by the Hendricks. The Hendrick-Hendrick assessment measures attitudes regarding each of the six love styles conceptualized by Lee (1973/1976). Lee's theory posits three primary love styles: (a) erns, which is romantic or passionate love, (b) ludus, which is game playing love, and (c) storge, which is friendship love. Lee suggested that three secondary styles are formed as compounds of the primary styles, but still have their own unique properties and characters: (d) mania, which is a compound of ludus and eros, (e) pragma, which is a compound of storge and ludus, and (f) agape, which is a compound of eros and storge.' One important counseling-related controversy involves whether lovers can be so enmeshed or co-dependent that their love is
dysfunctional (cf. Thompson & Borrello, 1987). The relationships
between love styles and personality dysfunction also warrant exploration, for example, to test Freud's theoretical proposition
conceptualized by Lee (1973/1976). Specifically,^ the^ instrument evaluates agreement/disagreement with seven items measuring each love style, using a 1 to 7 Likert-scale format. For example, one Ludus item asserts, "I try to keep my lover a little uncertain about my commitment to him/her." Total scale scores are then computed for each style by summing responses to each of the seven items on a given scale. The six scores on this measure constituted one variable set in our study. Personality function was measured using the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-II (Millon, 1990). This widely-used and respected instrument yields scores on each of 25 clinical scales (e.g., dependent, schizoid, borderline, narcissistic, bipolar). The measure also includes scales that can be used to detect invalid protocols. The 144 subjects employed in the present analysis all provided usable data, according to protocol validity criteria presented within the manual. Scores of an additional four subjects (a = 148-4 = 144) had already been previously excluded for failure to meet these criteria. Results We conducted two analyses in our exploratory examinations of relationships between personality disorder scores and love-styles perception scores. First, we examined the bivariate product-moment correlations coefficients between perceptions of the six love styles and scores on the 25 MCMI-II scales. These coefficients are reported in Table 1. INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE.
We also conducted multiple regression analyses using the 25 MCMI-II scores to predict scores on perceptions of the six love styles. We declined to succumb to the temptation to conduct stepwise regression analyses, arising from the fact that the number of predictor variables was 25, because the deleterious, evil effects of stepwise analyses are now so well documented (Snyder, 1991; Thompson, 1989, 1995), and we knew better. Instead, we conducted all-possible-subsets analyses to determine the R 2 for each possible combination of the variables for all possible sizes of predictor variable sets (i.e., 1, 2, 3, ...25). Figure 1 presents a line graph of the largest R 2 values for each of the 25 predictor-variable set-sizes when predicting each of the six love styles. INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE. Since our primary interest was in generally describing the most noteworthy relationships, we decided a priori to conduct and report complete regression analyses for each of the six love styles only for the best variable set of the size, four predictor variables. The beta weights, structure coefficients (Thompson & Borrello, 1985) , and R 2 values for these six regression analyses are presented in Table 2. INSERT TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE.
piscussion The analyses reported in the figures and the tables indicate
precepts of Mania had higher scores on the borderline (r=+.38), depression (r=+.34), disclosure (r=+.34), debasement (r=+.33), self-defeating (r=+.32), and somatoform (r=+.30) scales. Persons who agreed more with the precepts of Agape had higher scores on the dependence (r=+.32) and compulsive (r=+.25) scales. Persons who agreed more with the precepts of Pragma^ had^ higher scores on the thought disorder (r=+.22) and delusional (r=+.20) scales. Persons who agreed more 'iith the precepts of Storge had higher scores on the desirability (r=+.26) and compulsive (r=+.24) scales, but lower scores on the debasement (r=-.22) and depression (r=-.22) scales. Persons who agreed more with the precepts of Eros had higher scores on the compulsive (r=+.20) scale, but lower scores on the drug dependence (r=-.25), antisocial (r=-.21), debasement (r=-.20) and depression (r=-.20) scales. The Table 2 results are especially useful for evaluating whether bivariate relationships are directly interpretable. Because so few of the tabled results indicate the presence of strong suppressor variable effects (near-zero structure coefficients or _ of the predictor with a love style, yet a large non-zero beta weight), the relationships between the personality disorder scores r'd the agreement with love styles seem not to be moderated by suppressor-variable dynamics. It is completely sensible that Ludus and Mania were most predictable from the personality disorder scores, as reported in Figure 1 and Table 2. Ludus would not be viewed by most therapists as the healthiest form of love (although Ludus may create an
invigorating undercurrent in relationships based primarily on other love styles). And Mania involves elements of obsessive thought and enmeshment that can represent love taken to a dysfunctional limit. Eros and Storge, at the other extreme, are primarily sexual and friendship-based loves, respectively, and may be better predicted by more normal variations within personality. It is also sensible that some of the more serious clinical personality patterns and syndromes (e.g., schizoid, sadistic, histrionic, narcissistic, bipolar) have essentially no relationships with agreement/disagreement regarding any of the six love styles, as reported in Table 1. Severely disordered personality function may render irrelevant any capacity to love or any immediate concerns about love. In summary, the present results provide further corroboration supporting a conclusion that scores from the Love Attitudes Scale may be construct valid. One implication of the results is that counselors may wish to use this assessment with clients to create a framework to explore issues involving love relationships. Of course, as with any assessment used to facilitate intervention, the primary utility of the assessment involves the framework itself and the discussion the framework facilitates, rather than in scores per se. And it must also be remembered that too little is known at this point about love to vest complete confidence in scores from this (Rotzein et al., 1994) or any similar assessment. The present study provides yet one more set of insights regarding (^) the nature and dynamics of love. Understanding love is
References Borrello, G.M., & Thompson, B. (1990a). An hierarchical analysis of the Hendrick-Hendrick measure of Lee's typology of love. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 3, 327-342. Borrello, G.M., & Thompson, B. (1990b). A note regarding the validity of Lee's typology of love. Journal of Psycholoav, 2.j(6) , 639-644. Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Finding out the meaning of true love. (1992, December 22). USA Today, Section D, p. 1. Freud, S. (1924). On narcissism. In J. Rivier & J. Strachy (Eds.), Collected capers of Sigmund Freud. New York: International Psychoanalytic Press. Gray, P. (1993, February 15). What is love? [Cover story]. Time, 111(7), 46-49. Hendrick, C., & Hendrick, S. (1986). A theory and method of love. Journal of Personality and Social Psycholoav, LQ, 392-402. Hendrick, C., & Hendrick, S. (1989). Research on love: Does it measure up? Journal of Personality and Social Psycholoav, 56, 784-794. Hendrick, C., & Hendrick, S.S. (1990). A relationship-specific version of the Love Attitudes Scale. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 5, 239-254. Hendrick, S.S., & Hendrick, C. (1987a). Love and sex attitudes: A close relationship. In W.H. Jones & D. Perlman (Eds.), Advances
in personal relationships (Vol. 1, pp. 141-169). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Hendrick, S.S., & Hendrick, C. (1987b). Love and sexual attitudes, self-disclosure and sensation seeking. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 4, 281-297. Hendrick, S.S., & Hendrick, C. (1992). Romantic love. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE. Lee, J. A. (1973). The colors of love: An exploration of the ways of loving. Don Mills, Ontario: New Press. (Popular Edition,
Millon, T. (1990). The Millon Multiaxial Inventory-II. Minneapolis: National Computer Systems. Murthy, K., Rotzien, A., & Vacha-Haase, T. (in press). Second-order structure underlying the Hendrick-Hendrick Love Attitudes Scale. Educational and Psychological Measurement. Rotzien, A., Vacha-Haase, T., Murthy, K., Davenport, D., & Thompson, B. (1994). A confirmatory factor analysis of the Hendrick-Hendrick Love Attitudes Scale: We may not yet have an acceptable model. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 1(4), 360-374. Rubin, Z. (1984). Toward a science of relationships. Contemporary Psychology, 29, 856-858. Snyder, P. (1991). Three reasons why stepwise regression methods should not be used by researchers. In B. Thompson (Ed.) , (1991). ,Advances in educational research: Substantive findings. methodological developments (Vol. 1, pp. 99-105). Greenwich, CT:
factors using confirmatory methods: An illustration with the Hendrick-Hendrick love instrument. Educational and Psycholoa ical Measurement, 52, 69-77. Wrightsman, L. S., & Deaux, K. (1981). Social psychology in the 80s. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Table 1
Correlations of 25 MCMI-II Scores
with Scores on Preferences for the Six Love Styles
MCMI-II Love Style
Variable Ludus Mania Agape Pragma Storge Eros
DependentDebasement -.3045** +.1340 +.3230** +.1932* +.1796^ +.1819
Major Depress. +.3000+.2590^ +.3295+.3425^ +.0838+.0656^ -.0536-.1407^ -.2250-.2192^ -.2056-.2053
Compulsive -.1951* -.1181 +.2486** +.1770* +.2435** +.2052*
Al. Dependent +.3590** +.2315** -.0138 -.0061 -.1666^ -.1747
Disclosure +.3227** +.3418** +.1640* +.0732 -.0548 -.
Borderline +.3529** +.3819** +.0305 -.0104 -.1631 -.
Passive Agg. +.2522** +.2779** +.0044 -.0468 -.1425 -.
Desirability -.1170 -.0350 +.2087* +.1295 +.2647** +.1878*
Drug DependentThought Disor. +.2409** +.1320 -.0595 -.0187 -.0500 -.2510**
+.2579** +.1195 +.0723^ +.2177**^ +.0149^ -.
Self-defeating +.1064 +.3195** +.1905* +.0542 -.0164 -.
AnitsocialAvoidant +.2767** +.0794 -.1404 -.0700 -.0885 -.2093*
Dysthymic +.1960^ +.2356*^ +.0834^ -.0542^ -.1342^ -.
Somatoform +.0056 +.3018** +.1436 +.1003 -.0214 +.
Paranoid +.2252** +.0789 +.1216 +.1502 +.0717 -.
Anxious +. 1103 +.2029* +.0463 +.0031 -.1290 -.
Delusional +.1286 +.0198 +.1137 +.2018* +.0856 -.
Schizotypal +.1215 +.1841* +.1610 +.0883 -.1150 -.
Schizoid -.0869 +.0098 +.1500 -.0414 -.0278 -.
Agg. Sadistic +.1471 +.1358 -.0194 +.0276 -.0598 -.
Histrionic +.0732 +.1398 +.0289 +.1181 +.1058 +.
Narcissistic +.0752 -.0388 -.0493 +.0876 +.0858 -.
Bipolar/Manic -.0385 +.0642 -.0706 +.0679 +.0354 -.
* p < .05 ** p <.
All-Possible Subsets Analyses Using the 25 MCMI-Il Scores as Predictors
Ludus Mania Pragma Agape Eros Storge
Number of Predictors
Appendix A Five Best Predictor Sets of Size 4 Love Number in Style Model R-square Variables in Model EROS 4 0.14512590 ZOI DEPEND COMPUL DRUGDE 44 0.14461893 ZOI DEPEND NARCIS DRUGDE 4 0.141098240.13979091^ DEPEND HISTRI COMPUL DRUGDEZSCALE DEPEND BORDER DRUGDE LUDUS 4 0.13804164^ DEPEND NARCIS ANXIET DRUGDE 44 0.24066332 ZOI AVOID DEPEND ALCOHO 4 0.239386770.23936289 DEPEND NARCIS ALCOHO THOUGHAVOID DEPEND SOMATO ALCOHO 4 0.23849837 XSCALE DEPEND NARCIS ALCOHO STORGE 4 0.23714306^ AVOID DEPEND ALCOHO THOUGH (^4) 0.15134012 DEPEND NARCIS COMPUL DYSTHY (^4) 0.13937348 DEPEND HISTRI COMPUL DYSTHY 4 0.13909916 DEPEND NARCIS COMPUL ANXIET 4 0.13853741 YSCALE DEPEND COMPUL DYSTHY PRAGMA 4 0.13623254^ ZSCALE DEPEND NARCIS COMPUL 4 0.15414424 DEPEND PARANO THOUGH MAJDEP 44 0.15221589 DEPEND HISTRI THOUGH MAJDEP 4 0.151707020.14951597^ DEPEND NARCIS THOUGH MAJDEP 4 0.14792890 AVOID DEPEND THOUGH MAJDEPAVOID DEPEND DYSTHY THOUGH MANIA (^4) 0.23996920 XSCALE HISTRI SOMATO DELUSI (^4) 0.23819439 XSCALE SOMATO DYSTHY DELUSI (^4) 0.23668494 XSCALE ANXIET SOMATO DELUSI (^4) 0.23592771 XSCALE BORDER SOMATO DELUSI (^4) 0.23551443 SEFDEF BORDER SOMATO DYSTHY AGAPE 4 0.18919312 (^) XSCALE DEPEND COMPUL DYSTHY 4 0.18669355 (^) XSCALE DEPEND HISTRI COMPUL 4 0.18418000 DEPEND HISTRI COMPUL SCHIZT 44 0.18268256 XSCALE DEPEND COMPUL ANXIET 0.18148521 ZSCALE DEPEND HISTRI COMPUL
