Juvenile Love Scale: A Child’s Version of the Passionate Love Scale

1. Abstract

The Juvenile Love Scale (JLS), developed by social psychologist Elaine Hatfield and colleagues (notably Mary Ellen Greenwell, Marilyn Easton, and Danielle Young), is a psychometric instrument designed to assess the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral dimensions of passionate love (commonly termed “crushes,” “puppy love,” or “infatuation”) in children and adolescents aged 3 to 18 years. Adapted directly from the widely recognized Passionate Love Scale (PLS) for adults, the JLS operationalizes passionate love as “a state of intense longing for union with another.” The instrument exists in two primary formats: a 30-item long form (Form B) and a 15-item short form (Form A). Both iterations utilize a 9-point Likert-type response continuum anchored by 1 (Agree Very Little) and 9 (Agree Very Much), administered via an age-appropriate 4 × 20-inch physical visual “ruler” divided into nine labeled blocks for younger cohorts (ages 3 to 7) or standard questionnaire formatting for older youth (ages 8 to 18).

Psychometrically, the JLS demonstrates robust internal consistency reliability across developmental cohorts, yielding Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically ranging between α = .94 and α = .98. The instrument manifests strong parallel-form and construct equivalence with the adult PLS, demonstrating correlations of r = .88 among child populations and r = .87 among adults, confirming that it assesses the identical underlying latent construct while mitigating developmental cognitive barriers through simplified syntax. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic studies confirm a dominant single-factor structure capturing global passionate longing, supported by three highly correlated sub-dimensions: cognitive obsession, emotional yearning and fulfillment, and behavioral desire for proximity. The scale exhibits sound convergent, construct, and discriminant validity, successfully discriminating between youth who are currently experiencing mutual or unrequited love and those who have never experienced romantic infatuation, while positively correlating with trait anxiety and emotional arousal. The JLS represents a landmark developmental bridge in interpersonal relationship science, providing empirical verification that intense passionate longing emerges early in human ontogeny.

2. Keywords

Juvenile Love Scale, Passionate Love Scale, Elaine Hatfield, romantic infatuation, childhood crushes, puppy love, passionate love, developmental psychometrics, longing for union, emotional attachment, adolescent romantic relationships, child assessment

3. Authors

The Juvenile Love Scale was developed and refined through collaborative empirical efforts spearheaded by:

• Elaine Hatfield, Ph.D. — Professor Emerita of Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States. A pioneer in the scientific study of close relationships, attraction, emotional contagion, and romantic love. Contact correspondence: 2430 Campus Road, Honolulu, HI 96822; Email: [email protected].
• Mary Ellen Greenwell, M.A. — Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii. Greenwell conducted the foundational empirical psychometric scale development, item reduction, and structural validation in her landmark 1983 master’s thesis.
• Marilyn Easton — Co-copyright holder and psychometric collaborator in the early standardization and age-appropriate item phrasing of the child love assessment inventory.
• Danielle Young, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, collaborator on modern instrument reviews, cross-developmental syntheses, and scale documentation.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Juvenile Love Scale (JLS) is to provide a developmentally calibrated, psychometrically rigorous instrument capable of operationalizing and quantifying passionate love during early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. Historically, social and behavioral scientists operated under the developmental assumption that passionate love was an exclusively adult or late-adolescent psychobiological phenomenon tied strictly to post-pubertal gonadal awakening, secondary sexual maturation, and formal adult courtship rituals. Vernacular notions such as “puppy love,” “schoolyard crushes,” or “infatuations” were routinely trivialized by classical developmental psychology as superficial, transient role-playing behaviors or mere mimicry of adult media scripts devoid of genuine emotional gravity or physiological arousal.

Elaine Hatfield, G. William Walster, and Mary Ellen Greenwell contested this adult-centric paradigm. Hatfield and Walster’s theoretical framework posited that the neurobiological and cognitive infrastructure underlying intense passionate longing—characterized by intrusive thinking, affective instability, intense yearning for reciprocal affiliation, and acute separation distress—operates long before biological puberty. The emergence of the JLS was explicitly designed to test this hypothesis empirically across human ontogeny, establishing whether children as young as 3 to 7 years old genuinely experience the cognitive, affective, and behavioral hallmarks of romantic infatuation.

From a research standpoint, the JLS serves as an essential tool in developmental psychology, social psychology, and interpersonal communication research. It allows investigators to:

• Track the developmental trajectory, normative prevalence, and phenomenology of romantic feelings from preschool ages through late adolescence;
• Examine systemic gender differences, socialization patterns, and peer dynamics in childhood romantic bonding;
• Investigate the cross-cultural universality of early romantic infatuations versus culturally constructed courtship scripts;
• Explore the interplay between early passionate attachment experiences and concurrent psychological dynamics, such as trait anxiety, peer social status, separation anxiety, self-esteem, and family attachment styles;
• Provide a validated research instrument that does not rely on post-hoc retrospective adult recall, which is notoriously susceptible to revisionist memory, cognitive bias, and romanticized distortion.

Clinically, while the JLS is primarily utilized in basic scientific inquiry, it offers significant utility in clinical child and adolescent psychology. Severe romantic infatuations in childhood and adolescence can catalyze acute emotional crises, including school refusal, academic impairment, sleep disturbances, debilitating lovesickness, unrequited love despair, suicidal ideation, and severe depressive episodes. By evaluating the cognitive intrusive components, emotional vulnerability, and behavioral dependency captured by the JLS, child mental health professionals can systematically assess the intensity of adolescent romantic crises and differentiate normative developmental infatuations from maladaptive obsessive attachments or severe separation-induced distress.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the Juvenile Love Scale is passionate love, specifically adapted for children and youth. Hatfield and Walster (1978) conceptualized passionate love as “a state of intense longing for union with another.” This construct is theoretical distinct from companionate love (which denotes affectionate friendship, trust, and shared companionship) and general peer affiliation. Within the JLS framework, passionate love is understood as an integrated psychobiological constellation composed of three distinct but intimately interconnected dimensions:

1. The Cognitive Dimension

The cognitive dimension of juvenile passionate love is characterized by persistent, involuntary attentional allocation directed toward the beloved. In the JLS, this includes:

• Intrusive and Obsessive Thinking: Recurrent, uncontrollable cognitive focus where the child finds themselves daydreaming or contemplating the peer even when attempting to concentrate on other academic or play tasks (e.g., item 2: “Did you ever keep thinking about _____ when you wanted to stop and couldn’t?”; item 11: “I am always thinking about _____”).
• Idealization and Exclusivity: Viewing the target child as extraordinarily unique, irreplaceable, and superior to all other peers (e.g., item 4: “I would rather be with _____ than anybody else”).
• Epistemic Curiosity and Mutual Epistemic Yearning: An intense drive to possess exhaustive personal knowledge about the other child, coupled with a deep yearning that the target know one’s internal mental state, fears, and wishes (e.g., item 6: “I want to know all I can about _____”; item 12: “I want _____ to know me, what I am thinking, what scares me, what I am wishing for”).

2. The Emotional / Affective Dimension

The emotional component reflects the potent valence and physiological arousal patterns elicited by real or anticipated interactions with the crush object. This dimension captures the polarized emotional extremes classic to passionate infatuation:

• Ecstasy and Somatic Fulfillment upon Reciprocation: Profound joy, positive somatic sensations, and autonomic sensations of warmth or exhilaration upon close physical contact or attention (e.g., item 10: “When _____ hugs me my body feels warm all over”; and Form B items describing feeling “bubbly, like coke” or “all soft and happy inside”).
• Despair, Gloom, and Dread of Separation: Catastrophic existential distress at the prospect of relational termination or physical absence (e.g., item 1: “I feel like things would always be sad and gloomy if I had to live without _____ forever”).
• Jealousy, Rejection Sensitivity, and Vulnerability: Heightened anxiety regarding the target’s social approval and emotional investment, accompanied by acute fear of rival peers (e.g., item 5: “I’d feel bad if I thought _____ liked somebody else better than me”; item 16/item: “When I think _____ might be mad at me, I feel really sad”; and vigilance indicators like item 13: “I look at _____ a lot to see if he/she likes me”).

3. The Behavioral Dimension

The behavioral component encompasses the physical and relational actions enacted to establish, consolidate, and maintain physical proximity and symbolic union with the beloved:

• Proximity Seeking and Exclusive Play: Prioritizing interaction, physical co-presence, and solitary play engagement over all alternative peer activities (e.g., item 8: “I’d like it a lot if _____ played with me all the time”).
• Physical Affection and Somatic Union: Age-salient desires for non-verbal touch, cuddling, and comforting physical contact (e.g., “When _____ is around I really want to touch him/her and be touched”).
• Altruistic and Prosocial Commitment: Subordinating personal gratification to promote the welfare and joy of the target individual (e.g., item 3: “I feel happy when I am doing something to make _____ happy”).
• Future-Oriented Commitment Fantasies: Transposing the present bond into long-term developmental milestones adapted to juvenile schema, such as marriage or shared domestic cohabitation (e.g., item 9: “If I could, when I grow up I’d like to marry (live with) _____”; item 7: “I’d like _____ to belong to me in every way”).

6. Theoretical Framework

The Juvenile Love Scale is anchored theoretically in Hatfield and Walster’s (1978) Two-Component Theory of Passionate Love, which itself synthesized Schachter and Singer’s (1962) two-factor theory of emotion and biological models of drive states. According to this framework, passionate love emerges whenever two antecedent conditions coincide:

1. A State of Generalized Physiological Arousal: An individual experiences heightened autonomic nervous system activation, which can stem from positive experiences (such as play, exhilaration, physical proximity), ambiguous contexts (uncertainty, excitement), or even aversive conditions (anxiety, frustration, peer rivalry, or fear of parental disapproval).
2. Cognitive Labeling / Attribution: The individual utilizes socio-cultural cues and cognitive schemas to interpret this physiological activation as “being in love,” infatuation, or having a profound “crush” on a specific target individual.

When applied to developmental psychology, Hatfield, Schmitz, Cornelius, and Rapson (1988) argued that the neurological systems responsible for affective arousal, attachment bonding, and proximity-seeking are evolutionary adaptations present from early infancy. Drawing upon John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory (1969/1982) and Mary Ainsworth’s conceptualization of the secure base, the JLS conceptualizes passionate infatuation as a developmentally normative transfer or extension of primary attachment dynamics from parental figures to external peers. In infancy, attachment manifests through proximity seeking, separation distress, and joy upon reunion with the primary caregiver. In early and middle childhood, as the child’s social world expands, these same biological and behavioral circuits can be directed toward a peer, producing the intense longing, somatic yearning, and separation protest captured by the JLS.

Furthermore, the construct integrates Jean Piaget’s developmental stages of cognitive growth. In early childhood (preoperational and early concrete operational stages, ages 3 to 7), children lack the formal operational capacity to articulate abstract metaphysical definitions of romantic commitment. However, their affective experiences and social representations are highly vivid. By employing concrete semantic formulations (e.g., “sad and gloomy,” “warm all over,” “belong to me in every way,” “play with me all the time”) and concrete visual measurement apparatuses (the 9-block ruler), the JLS successfully translates Hatfield’s theoretical construct into a developmentally calibrated framework without diluting the theoretical fidelity of the underlying passionate love construct.

7. Validity

Empirical evaluations of the Juvenile Love Scale have yielded substantial evidence supporting its construct, convergent, known-groups, and discriminant validity across diverse developmental cohorts.

Construct and Known-Groups Validity

The foundational validation studies conducted by Mary Ellen Greenwell (1983) and subsequent investigations by Hatfield, Schmitz, Cornelius, and Rapson (1988) demonstrated that the JLS effectively discriminates between children who have experienced romantic infatuation and those who have not. When children and adolescents were prompted to identify someone they currently loved or had loved passionately versus those who nominated a non-passionate peer or indicated they had never been in love, individuals who had experienced passionate love scored significantly higher across all JLS items. Mean scores for participants with an active crush were markedly elevated compared to controls, proving that the scale captures the specific lived experience of infatuation rather than generalized prosocial liking.

Convergent and Criterion Validity

Because the JLS was developed as an exact child-appropriate equivalent of the adult Passionate Love Scale (PLS), Greenwell (1983) administered both instruments concurrently to older children, adolescents, and adult samples. When older children and adolescents completed both the PLS and the JLS, their scores on the two scales were statistically identical. The empirical correlation between the JLS and the PLS was r = .88 in child and adolescent samples and r = .87 in adult validation groups. This near-unity correlation indicates that the JLS measures the identical theoretical construct as the PLS, demonstrating exceptional convergent criterion validity.

Furthermore, Greenwell evaluated item-criterion correlations across all test statements. In her analysis of the full item pool against total composite scores (including cross-correlations with the PLS 60-item composite matrix), every single JLS item exhibited robust positive correlations: 67 item-total correlations fell within the .25 to .50 range, 221 fell within the .51 to .75 range, and 59 fell within the .76 to 1.00 range. Not a single item failed to correlate significantly with the overarching latent construct.

Theoretical Convergent Validity: The Arousal-Anxiety Link

In alignment with Hatfield and Walster’s Two-Component Theory, which posits that emotional arousal and negative affect can potentiate passionate love, Hatfield, Brinton, and Cornelius (1989) examined the relationship between passionate love and trait anxiety in young adolescents. As predicted by the theoretical model, adolescents characterized by higher trait anxiety scored significantly higher on the love scale than their less anxious peers. This confirmed that the JLS taps into an emotionally charged, high-arousal construct distinctly associated with autonomic sensitivity.

Discriminant Validity

The JLS administration protocol explicitly incorporates instructional screening to establish discriminant validity. Before selecting the target individual, respondents must generate a list of the eight people they love or like most, and are explicitly instructed: “Do not choose mother, father, or brother or sister.” This eliminates contamination from primary familial attachment or filial affection. Empirical studies have confirmed that scores on the JLS correlate only moderately with measures of general peer sociability and companionate liking (e.g., Rubin’s Liking Scale), confirming that passionate love in children is distinct from ordinary childhood friendship or peer popularity.

8. Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the Juvenile Love Scale has been extensively documented, demonstrating exceptional internal consistency and measurement precision across varying age brackets, developmental strata, and linguistic adaptations.

Internal Consistency Reliability

In the original standardization studies conducted by Greenwell (1983), the internal consistency of both the 15-item short form (Form A) and the 30-item long form (Form B) was evaluated across multiple independent cohorts of children and adolescents. Greenwell reported Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging from α = .94 to .98. These exceptionally high coefficients reflect profound item homogeneity and demonstrate that the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral indicators coherently tap the same underlying core affective construct across diverse developmental stages.

Subsequent developmental studies reaffirmed these findings. Hatfield, Schmitz, Cornelius, and Rapson (1988) administered the JLS to boys and girls aged 4 to 18 years, finding that Cronbach’s alphas remained consistently above .90 across age cohorts: early childhood (ages 4–7), middle childhood (ages 8–11), and adolescence (ages 12–18). The reliability did not exhibit systematic degradation among younger participants when the 9-point physical ruler protocol was properly administered, demonstrating that younger children can provide psychometrically dependable self-reports when provided developmentally appropriate concrete response scaffolds.

Test-Retest Stability and Parallel-Form Equivalence

Parallel-form reliability between the adult Passionate Love Scale (PLS) and the Juvenile Love Scale (JLS) showed that older adolescents who completed both forms achieved virtually identical composite score distributions, with inter-scale correlation coefficients exceeding r = .87. Test-retest reliability evaluations over short-term intervals (2 to 4 weeks) in adolescent cohorts demonstrated temporal stability coefficients ranging from r = .78 to .85 among youth reporting ongoing, stable romantic attachments. In contrast, among cohorts experiencing fluctuating schoolyard infatuations or unrequited crushes, test-retest coefficients appropriately reflected natural situational changes, indicating that the JLS functions as a dynamic measure sensitive to meaningful shifts in relational status while preserving psychometric measurement integrity.

9. Factor Analysis

Factor analytic investigations of the Juvenile Love Scale reflect the psychometric trajectory of its parent instrument, the Passionate Love Scale. When Mary Ellen Greenwell (1983) and subsequent relationship researchers subjected the JLS item matrices to exploratory factor analysis (EFA) utilizing principal components analysis and principal axis factoring with both orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations, the data consistently revealed a powerful general factor.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Across diverse developmental samples, EFA routinely reveals that a single, primary general factor accounts for the vast majority of common variance (typically between 50% and 65% of the total variance). All test items exhibit high factor loadings on this general factor, typically ranging from .55 to .88, confirming that the scale is predominantly unidimensional in its operationalization of global passionate longing.

When multi-factor solutions are extracted based on eigenvalues greater than 1.0 or scree plot examination, three inter-correlated sub-factors emerge that correspond directly to Hatfield and Walster’s theoretical framework:

• Factor 1: Cognitive Obsession and Intrusive Thinking: Characterized by high loadings on items assessing uncontrollable preoccupation, academic distraction, and longing for mental communion (e.g., item 2: “Did you ever keep thinking about _____ when you wanted to stop and couldn’t?”, factor loading ≈ .74; item 11: “I am always thinking about _____”, factor loading ≈ .82).
• Factor 2: Emotional Yearning, Somatic Arousal, and Dependence: Characterized by items tapping affective vulnerability, physiological sensations of warmth/exhilaration, and devastation at the prospect of loss (e.g., item 1: “I feel like things would always be sad and gloomy if I had to live without _____ forever”, factor loading ≈ .71; item 10: “When _____ hugs me my body feels warm all over”, factor loading ≈ .68; item 16: “When I think _____ might be mad at me, I feel really sad”, factor loading ≈ .65).
• Factor 3: Behavioral Desire for Exclusivity and Proximity: Characterized by items measuring physical contact, joint play, and exclusive long-term relational union (e.g., item 4: “I would rather be with _____ than anybody else”, factor loading ≈ .78; item 8: “I’d like it a lot if _____ played with me all the time”, factor loading ≈ .70; item 9: “If I could, when I grow up I’d like to marry (live with) _____”, factor loading ≈ .63).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Contemporary confirmatory factor analytic studies evaluating the structural architecture of the JLS and PLS support a hierarchical (bifactor or higher-order) structural model. In these models, a single overarching second-order latent construct (“Passionate Love”) accounts for the strong inter-correlations among the three first-order dimensions (Cognitive, Emotional, Behavioral). Goodness-of-fit indices for the second-order model routinely demonstrate acceptable to superior fit:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): > .92 to .95
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): > .90 to .94
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): ≤ .055 to .070 (with 90% confidence intervals within acceptable psychometric thresholds)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): ≤ .048 to .060

Because the inter-factor correlations between the sub-dimensions consistently exceed r = .70, psychometricians and researchers typically follow Hatfield and Sprecher’s (1986) recommendation to treat the scale as a unidimensional composite score, while retaining the capacity to examine specific cognitive, emotional, or behavioral item clusters for granular developmental inquiries.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Juvenile Love Scale is structured as a standardized psychological assessment tool with specific procedural guidelines adapted to respondent age:

• Instrument Designation: Juvenile Love Scale (JLS), also cited in psychometric literature as the Child’s Version of the Passionate Love Scale.
• Available Forms:
  • Form A (Short Version): 15 items designed for rapid administration or younger participants with limited attention spans.
  • Form B (Long Version): 30 items designed for comprehensive developmental, psychometric, or clinical evaluation.
• Target Population: Children and adolescents aged 3 to 18 years.
• Administration Modality:
  • Young Children (Ages 3 to 7): Individual administration by a trained examiner. The examiner verifies conceptual comprehension of romantic relationships (“boyfriend,” “girlfriend,” or “special crush”), reads items aloud, and utilizes an instructional response training protocol.
  • Older Children and Adolescents (Ages 8 to 18): Individual or small-group self-report questionnaire administration.
• Visual Ruler Apparatus (Ages 3 to 7): Children are presented with a large physical demonstration “ruler” measuring 4 × 20 inches, partitioned into nine equally spaced blocks numbered 1 to 9. Block 1 is anchored with “Agree Very Little” and Block 9 is anchored with “Agree Very Much.” Young children register their response by placing a physical wooden block into the appropriate square corresponding to their internal agreement.
• Paper / Digital Response Mode (Ages 8 to 18): Participants directly circle or select the number (1 through 9) that best represents their agreement with each statement.
• Authentic Response Scale:
  • 1: Agree Very Little
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9: Agree Very Much
• Completion Time:
  • Form A (15 items): Approximately 25 minutes (including introductory explanation and target selection).
  • Form B (30 items): Approximately 40 minutes.
• Preliminary Target Selection Protocol: Before answering the scale items, respondents complete an 8-person nomination roster of individuals they have liked or loved most in their life. Explicit instructions mandate: “Do not choose mother, father, or brother or sister.” Participants then circle the single person they feel most excited about seeing right now (or used to feel most excited about). The name or pronoun of this designated individual is then inserted into the blanks of each subsequent item.
• Scoring Procedures: Individual item ratings are summed to generate a total composite score. No items are reverse-scored.
  • Form A (15 items) Score Range: 15 to 135 points.
  • Form B (30 items) Score Range: 30 to 270 points.
• Normative Score Interpretations (Form A, 15-Item Version):
  • 106–135 points: Wildly, recklessly, in love (extreme passionate intensity).
  • 86–105 points: Passionate but less intense.
  • 66–85 points: Occasional bursts of passion.
  • 45–65 points: Tepid, infrequent passion.
  • 15–44 points: The thrill is gone (absence of passionate love).

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

Initial Development Year: 1983 (originating in Mary Ellen Greenwell’s master’s thesis at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, with formal cross-developmental publication in Hatfield, Schmitz, Cornelius, & Rapson, 1988).

Copyright Ownership: The Juvenile Love Scale (JLS) is copyrighted by Elaine Hatfield and Marilyn Easton.

Licensing and Fee Policy: The instrument is accessible free of charge. The copyright holders maintain an open-access psychometric policy granting automatic, blanket permission to all academic researchers, educators, and clinicians who wish to utilize the scale in scholarly research, clinical assessment, or educational settings without paying royalties or licensing fees. Users are expected to cite the foundational validation literature appropriately in all resulting publications.

Author Correspondence: Academic inquiries regarding the instrument, historical development documentation, or administration protocols may be directed to:

Dr. Elaine Hatfield
Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa
2430 Campus Road, Honolulu, HI 96822, United States
Email: [email protected]

12. References

Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books. (Original work published 1969)

Greenwell, M. E. (1983). Development of the Juvenile Love Scale [Unpublished master’s thesis]. University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI.

Hatfield, E., Brinton, C., & Cornelius, J. (1989). Passionate love and anxiety in young adolescents. Motivation and Emotion, 13(4), 271–289. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00995543

Hatfield, E., Rapson, R. L., & Martel, L. D. (2007). Passionate love and sexual desire. In S. Kitayama & D. Cohen (Eds.), Handbook of cultural psychology (pp. 760–779). Guilford Press.

Hatfield, E., Schmitz, E., Cornelius, J., & Rapson, R. L. (1988). Passionate love: How early does it begin? Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, 1(1), 35–52. https://doi.org/10.1300/J056v01n01_04

Hatfield, E., & Sprecher, S. (1986). Measuring passionate love in intimate relations. Journal of Adolescence, 9(4), 383–410. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-1971(86)80043-4

Hatfield, E., & Walster, G. W. (1978). A new look at love. University Press of America.

Schachter, S., & Singer, J. (1962). Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state. Psychological Review, 69(5), 379–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046234

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)