The Structure of the Concepts Related to Love Spectrum: Emotional Verbal Fluency Technique Application, Initial Psychometrics, and Its Validation

Love has been thoroughly studied and a variety of definitions as well as types of love have been described in the literature. Given the data presenting natural language of love concept, the aim of the two present studies is to demonstrate a new technique which enables description of the structure of emotion concepts within love spectrum. This technique is based on emotional verbal fluency tasks. The procedure and the coding system used are reported in the article along with the data on reliability and standardization of the emotional verbal fluency technique. Construct validity is demonstrated by correlations of the emotional verbal fluency tasks with semantic and letter verbal fluency tasks, while discriminant validity is shown by correlations with other measures, such as the Triangular Love Scale, the Love Attitudes Scale, and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. The article also presents how the emotional verbal fluency technique can be used in exploring the structure of emotion concepts within love spectrum. This is based on a hierarchical cluster analysis. An examination of connections between semantic clusters identified in the emotional verbal fluency tasks allows describing a structure of the concepts within love spectrum, such as liking, infatuation, love, and show of its differentiation. The presented technique taking into account natural language is of value in assessments of the structure of emotion concepts.