When will I feel love? The effects of culture, personality, and gender on the psychological tendency to love

Abstract

Convenience samples from 48 nations completed a self-report measure of love called the “Emotional Investment” scale (EI; Schmitt, D. P., & Buss, D. M. (2000). Sexual dimensions of person description: Beyond or subsumed by the Big Five? Journal of Research in Personality, 34, 141–177). The seven-item EI scale possessed moderate to extensive internal reliability across all nations. Within most nations, higher levels of EI were associated with higher levels of Extraversion and Agreeableness but were unassociated with Neuroticism, providing evidence of the conceptual equivalence of love across cultures. As predicted by evolutionary theories of attachment, higher levels of ecological stress were associated with lower levels of EI within and across nations. Emotionally investing tendencies were also associated with fertility and sexual promiscuity levels, though these nation-level links were not always consistent with evolutionary perspectives. As expected by Parental Investment Theory, women reported higher levels of EI than men in nearly every culture, though the predicted sex difference was not observed in Bolivia, Indonesia, or Malaysia. Contrary to social role theories, greater sociopolitical gender equality across cultures was associated with larger sex differences in EI. Discussion focuses on limitations and alternative explanations of the current findings.