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This cross-cultural research explored the relationship between Hatfield & Rapson's (1993) love types and subjective well-being. College students from an individualistic culture (USA) and a collectivist culture (Korea) completed the Passionate Love Scale (PLS; Hatfield & Rapson), the Companionate Love Scale (CLS; Sternberg, 1986), the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS; Pivot & Diener, 1993), and the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS; Watson, Clarke, & Tellegen, 1988). It was found that two love types are related to subjective well-being in a different way: life satisfaction was more strongly predicted by companionate love than by passionate love, whereas positive and negative emotions were more accounted for by passionate love than by companionate love. No culture and gender difference was found in this overall relationship, but gender difference was found in the extent of the association between companionate love and satisfaction with life, and between passionate love and emotional experiences, respectively.
Among many typologies of love (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1996; Lee, 1973; Sternberg, 1986), Hatfield and Rapson's (1993) love types - passionate love and companionate love - have been accepted as a valid conceptualization of love regardless of age, gender, and culture in a wide array of research (Hatfield, & Rapson, 1996; Wang, & Nguyen, 1995).
In many studies it has been revealed that love is an important predictor of happiness, satisfaction, and positive emotions (Anderson, 1977; Diener & Lucas, 2000; Freeman, 1978; Myers, 1992). It is believed that various acts, such as kissing, sex, emotional contacts, and companionship exchanged in love relationships contribute to happiness (Glenn & Weaver, 1978; Ross, Mirowsky, & Goldesteen, 1990).
Despite wide use of Hatfield's concept of love types in psychological research, which type of love enhances happiness more effectively is not well known. The study reported here investigated the relationships between Hatfield's love types (passionate love and companionate love) and happiness through cross-cultural research conducted in the USA and Korea.
As a difficult concept to define, happiness has been conceptualized and measured in many different ways by different scholars (for review see Diener & Lucas, 2000) and subjective well-being has been the most popularly used concept to understand happiness in recent studies. Subjective well-being consists of two components: life satisfaction (a cognitive evaluation of one's overall life) and emotions (the...