Social Representation of Passionate Love Among Brazilian and French Youngsters

The goal of this research was to explore French and Brazilian participants’ social representation of passionate love. Data was collected throughout the use of the word association method where the inductive word was “passionate love.” Plus, all the participants had to answer to the Passionate Love Scale and the Love Attitude Scale. It was expected that the Brazilian participants would often associate passionate love with the ideas of committed relationships and with steadier emotions for living in a society that is more oriented toward collectivism. The French being more oriented toward individualism should privilege the expression of personal feelings and emotional states. We asked 202 French participants and 371 Brazilian participants to complete a questionnaire about romantic relationships. The French participants provided a list of 1104 words whereas the Brazilian participants provided a list of 2015 words. The two-word lists were separately submitted to a factorial analysis of correspondence, and a secondary analysis of similitudes explored word associations according to the participant’s nationality and gender. The result plots suggested that the French participants associated passionate love with intense emotional feelings composed of mostly positive but also some negative attributes. These feelings were associated with sexual desire and sexual attraction. The Brazilian participants considered that passionate love was a mix of tender and intense feelings. These feelings were associated with positive attributes and related to steady romantic relationships. The results obtained with the psychometric measures matched with what was found with the word association task. Gender differences were more evident among the Brazilian and male participants associating passionate love with sex more often than the female participants in both countries. We concluded that social representations of passionate love were influenced by gender and culture.