Conceptualizing Love as an Interpersonal Attraction

This chapter presents the complex concept of love as interpersonal attraction, including componential and phenomenological dimensions. It defines attraction as a constellation of psychological phenomena, including attitudes, emotions, moods, and attachments. The appraisal of an attractive person and a relationship triggers a variety of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes involved in interpersonal attraction. The chapter also describes what motivates interpersonal attraction, as well as how men and women experience and express attraction to another person. It also presents varieties of interpersonal bonding that involve attraction and attachment between individuals that animals and humans experience, along with corresponding research data. The last section of this chapter provides a review of the methodologies and methods that researchers have proposed in their studies to describe, explore, and measure love as an interindividual attraction.