Abstract

The persent study was designed to explore the relationships among the college students' six love styles(Eros, Ludus, Storge, Pragma, Mania, and Agape), the personal construct systems(Cognitive Complexity, Threat, Actualization, and Perceptual Shift), and the passionate love and additionally the frequency of love experience, the length of time in love, the depth of love, and the importance of love. Three hundred and seventy subjects9129 male students and 241 female students) completed Love Attitude Scale, Passionate Love Scale, Present Love Experience Questionnaire, and 13 constructs × 10 elements Rep Grid. The results revealed interesting relationships among the measures. For male students, more passionate, erotic, and altruistic lovers were cognitively not complex, but pragmatic lovers showed cognitively more complex. The erotic, possessive, and passionate male students showed lower levels of threat. For female students, more altruistic love was associated with less levels of threat, and more actualization; however, passionate love was associated with more perceptual shifting. Additional interesting findings were that more times in love, being in love a longer time, being more deeply in love, and more valuing romantic love were all related to greater relationship actualization, perceptual stability, and more cognitive complexity. Finally, the results and limitations of this study were discussed and suggestions are made for future research.

• Keywords: Love styles, Passionate love, Personal construct theory, Cognitive complexity