Abstract
Love is a feeling that includes different emotions and is responsible for the creation and maintenance of attachment bonds. Among the instruments developed to measure love, the Marriage and Relationship Questionnaire is noteworthy by its scope and replicability in different cultures. This questionnaire has 12 scales, of which the Love Scale was developed to assess the level of emotional attachment between partners in a romantic relationship. Our goal was to validate the Love Scale as an alternative measure of emotional attachment for Brazilian population. In this study, 176 individuals in a stable relationship participated. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted and verified one factor with high internal consistency, and relations with criteria questions as hypothesized. The scale was able to detect higher levels of emotional attachments between people who never thought to divorce compared to the ones who thought it more frequently. The adapted instrument showed satisfactory psychometrics properties for use in Brazil.
Keywords:
relationship; test validity; emotional bond; psychometrics; evolutionary psychology
