Abstract
We conducted a prototype analysis to explore men's and women's cognitions (knowledge and beliefs) about the nature of romantic love. In study 1 (compilation of prototypic features), participants listed the features of romantic love in a free response format. The most commonly generated characteristics were trust, sexual attraction/desire and acceptance/tolerance. In study 2 (centrality ratings), participants provided centrality ratings for the study 1 features. As before, central features included trust, honesty and sexual attraction/desire; peripheral features included submission/obedience, deception/lies and depression. In study 3 (memory tasks), participants read statements that used an equal mix of central and peripheral features to describe a relationship between two individuals, engaged in an interference task, and were asked to recognize and recall the original statements. As expected, participants falsely recognized and incorrectly recalled a greater number of central than peripheral features. Correlational analyses revealed that the number of times a feature was incorrectly recognized was positively associated with both its frequency and its centrality. These results support the hypothesis that the concept of romantic love is prototypically organized (i.e. has an internal structure), and that sexual desire is one of the central features of this concept.
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