The Concept of Love Viewed From a Prototype Perspective

Even if superordinate concepts (such as fruit, vehicle, sport ) are prototypically organized, basic-level concepts (such as apple, truck, hockey ) might be classically defined in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient features. A series of 6 studies examined 1 basic-level concept in the domain of emotion, love, and found that it is better understood from a prototype than a classical perspective. The natural language concept of love has an internal structure and fuzzy borders: Maternal love, romantic love, affection, love of work, self-love, infatuation, and other subtypes of love can be reliably ordered from better to poorer examples of love. In turn, each subtype's goodness as an example of love (prototypicality) was found to predict various indices of its cognitive processing. Implications for a scientific definition and typology of love are discussed.