Are adults’ love and hate more advanced?

The increased amount and quality of research on love and other sentiments in psychology of personality and social psychology are not in coherence with the attention to love and other sentiments in developmental psychology. At the same time it is no doubt impossible either to understand the role and mechanisms of these important phenomena, or the choice and change of partners in adulthood outside life-long development. The objective of this research is to fill the gap in the field and to compare the development of Love and Hate at different ages starting with adolescence. The Sternberg triangular model (Intimacy-Passion-Decision/Commitment) was used, and his second 45-item version of love measure (Sternberg, 1888, 1997) was adapted in Latvian and Russian. His model (Sternberg, 2005) was also used for the development of an original Likert-like 18-item Hate scale that became two-factor (active and passive) after two-stage data collection and Factor component analysis (Breslavs, Tjumeneva, 2008a). The hypothesis predicts different changes of love features and its links with hate, particularly the increase of Commitment and decrease of Passion in Adulthood. Three age samples (16-18, 26-28, 36-38) were selected. 240 participants filled in both inventories. The results are analyzed.

The increased amount and quality of research on love and other sentiments in psychology of personality and in social psychology show a significant shift of psychological priorities to more ecological processes in human life (Buss, 2000; Salovey, 1991; Sternberg, & Weis, 2006). The study of sentiments such as the Love, Jealousy, and Envy was recently supplemented by the study of Hate (Burris, & Rempel, 2006; Sternberg, 2005). As a result the first 18-item Likert-like the Hate scale (Breslavs, & Tjumeneva, 2008a) emerged. This increase of studies in the field is not in coherence with attention to love and other sentiments in developmental psychology. The topic of sentiments seems to be a “Cinderella” in many psychological branches including developmental psychology (Breslavs, 2006).

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