State Love Scale (STLOVE)

1. Abstract

The State Love Scale (STLOVE) is a psychometric instrument designed to assess an individual’s momentary, situational affective state characterized by feelings of love, interpersonal affection, and subjective emotional closeness toward others. Developed by consumer psychologists and behavioral researchers Lisa A. Cavanaugh, James R. Bettman, and Mary Frances Luce (2015), the instrument emerged within experimental investigations examining how discrete positive emotions differentially shape prosocial behavior and charitable consumption. Unlike trait measures of dispositional love, compassionate orientation, or chronic attachment styles, the STLOVE operationalizes love as a transient, state-dependent positive emotion that can be experimentally elicited, heightened, and measured in real time.

The scale exists in two validated brief configurations: a two-item version and an expanded three-item version. The two-item instrument evaluates experienced love using an anchored 9-point response format ranging from 0 (“none”) to 8 (“more than ever”), demonstrating exceptional internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = .93 in an experimental cohort of N = 65). The three-item variant assesses the intensity of the affective experience across a 7-point Likert-type continuum ranging from 1 (“did not experience at all”) to 7 (“experienced very intensely”), displaying robust psychometric reliability (α = .86, N = 147). Psychometric evaluations confirm high unidimensional factor loading, robust convergent validity with related prosocial affects, and critical discriminant validity against general positive valence, distinct positive emotions such as hope and pride, and global happiness as indexed by companion measures like the State Happiness Scale. The STLOVE serves as an efficient manipulation check and state assessment tool across affective science, social psychology, experimental marketing, and behavioral economics.

2. Keywords

State Love Scale, STLOVE, state love, discrete positive emotions, prosocial behavior, emotional manipulation check, affection, subjective closeness, affective psychometrics, momentary affect, positive psychology

3. Authors

The State Love Scale was introduced and validated by an interdisciplinary team of researchers in marketing, consumer behavior, and behavioral decision research:

• Lisa A. Cavanaugh, Ph.D. – Associate Professor of Marketing and Behavioural Science, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Research specialization: discrete emotions, prosocial spending, interpersonal relationships, and consumer psychology.
• James R. Bettman, Ph.D. – Burlington Industries Professor of Business Administration Emeritus, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA. Research specialization: consumer decision-making, behavioral information processing, emotion, and self-identity.
• Mary Frances Luce, Ph.D. – Robert A. Ingram Professor of Business Administration, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA. Research specialization: emotional trade-offs in decision-making, patient healthcare decisions, and affect-cognition interactions.

4. Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the State Love Scale (STLOVE) is to capture transient, momentary fluctuations in experienced love and interpersonal warmth resulting from targeted situational stimuli, laboratory manipulations, media exposures, or contextual primes. While traditional affective assessment instruments—such as the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS)—measure positive valence at a broad, generalized level, emerging affective science increasingly demonstrates that discrete positive emotions exert divergent, highly nuanced effects on human cognition, judgment, and social behavior. The STLOVE was explicitly formulated to address the methodological requirement for a sensitive, psychometrically sound, brief index capable of isolating love from general positive mood states, happiness, pride, and hope.

In consumer behavior and social decision research, researchers frequently encounter experimental scenarios where distinct positive emotions yield contrasting behavioral consequences. For instance, Cavanaugh, Bettman, and Luce (2015) established that while positive emotions such as general happiness, pride, or hope tend to channel prosocial giving toward socially close or ingroup targets, experimentally induced state love broadens individuals’ communal boundaries. Elevated state love uniquely motivates individuals to direct significant resources, volunteering efforts, and charitable donations toward socially, culturally, and geographically distant outgroup members. Consequently, developing a micro-assessment tool that precisely captures state love as an independent manipulation check became vital for empirical rigor.

Beyond its initial application as an experimental manipulation check, the scale fulfills several key clinical, organizational, and behavioral research purposes:

• Experimental Emotion Research: Verifying the acute elicitation of love following experimental inductions, including guided episodic recall, autobiographical writing tasks, exposure to emotional narrative advertisements, and guided imagery paradigms.
• Differentiation of Valence from Emotion Specificity: Providing empirical separation between generalized pleasant valence (e.g., subjective wellbeing, global positive affect) and the distinct motivational drive inherent to feelings of tender interpersonal connection.
• Prosocial Intervention Tracking: Monitoring real-time psychological shifts within relationship therapy, empathy training, compassion-focused interventions, and cross-cultural bridging workshops.
• Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA): Due to its brief two- or three-item composition, the STLOVE minimizes respondent burden, rendering it exceptionally well-suited for repeated-measures diary studies and smartphone-based ambulatory assessments tracking momentary relational feelings across daily life.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct evaluated by the State Love Scale is state love, conceptually delineated as a momentary positive affective state characterized by acute feelings of tenderness, affection, psychological warmth, and perceived subjective closeness directed toward others. Psychologists distinguish between love as a complex multifaceted syndrome, an enduring attachment orientation, an interpersonal commitment bond, and an acute experiential emotion. The STLOVE focuses strictly on the latter: love experienced as an immediate, situated emotional reaction.

5.1 Core Dimensions of State Love

The state love construct captured by the scale synthesizes three complementary theoretical facets into a single, cohesive affective experience:

• Felt Affection and Tenderness: The immediate visceral and cognitive sensation of warmth, fondness, and benevolence. This facet reflects an active emotional caring orientation, transcending mere intellectual appreciation or polite social liking.
• Subjective Interpersonal Closeness: A momentary psychological state characterized by diminished social distance and expanded interpersonal boundaries. Under states of high felt love, individuals perceive an interconnectedness with others, mirroring what Arthur Aron and colleagues conceptualized as the temporary inclusion of other in the self.
• Communal and Relational Motivation: Unlike self-enhancement positive emotions (such as pride, which directs attention toward personal competence and ego validation), state love centers attention outwardly on relational bonds and the intrinsic welfare of human beings, fostering an altruistic, communal mindset.

5.2 Differentiating State Love from Related Emotional Constructs

To fully understand the construct of state love, it must be contrasted with adjacent affective and relational states:

• State Love vs. State Happiness: Happiness is an overarching state of pleasant hedonic tone and satisfaction. While love is almost invariably experienced as positive and pleasant, it carries specific relational content. One can feel thoroughly happy without experiencing interpersonal love (e.g., savoring personal financial gain or individual recreational success), whereas state love fundamentally entails emotional communion and connection.
• State Love vs. Trait Attachment: Trait attachment measures enduring internal working models of self and others built over developmental history (e.g., secure, anxious, or avoidant attachment). In contrast, state love reflects acute fluctuations in felt warmth that can be experienced by individuals across any attachment baseline when prompted by appropriate contextual cues.
• State Love vs. Compassion/Empathic Concern: While compassion typically arises in response to another person’s observed distress or suffering and is oriented toward relieving pain, state love can be elicited in fully benign, joyful, or affiliative contexts characterized purely by shared humanity and connection.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual foundation of the State Love Scale rests at the convergence of several major theories in affective psychology, evolutionary biology, and consumer judgment.

6.1 Appraisal Theory of Emotion

According to Appraisal Theories of Emotion (e.g., Smith & Ellsworth, 1985; Roseman, 1991; Lazarus, 1991), specific emotions are elicited not merely by generic positive or negative events, but by distinct cognitive appraisals regarding agency, pleasantness, certainty, attentional activity, and relational meaning. Positive emotions do not share a single uniform appraisal pattern. Pride stems from appraisals of personal achievement and internal agency. Hope arises under conditions of situational uncertainty accompanied by prospective desire. In contrast, love emerges from appraisals of other-person affinity, shared social communion, and high relational significance. The STLOVE is grounded in the premise that experimentally cueing appraisals of interpersonal tenderness elicits a distinct emotional profile that operates through unique cognitive and motivational channels.

6.2 The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions

Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build Theory (1998, 2001, 2013) posits that while negative emotions narrow momentary thought-action repertoires to support acute survival actions (e.g., fight or flight), positive emotions broaden individuals’ cognitive frameworks, social awareness, and behavioral options. Fredrickson specifically identified love as a “micro-moment of positivity resonance”—a shared state of positive affect, mutual care, and synchronized biological connection. In the framework advanced by Cavanaugh et al. (2015), state love broadens social boundaries more profoundly than other positive emotions, dissolving perceived boundaries between social categories and motivating prosocial investment toward distant recipients who would otherwise be excluded from one’s moral circle.

6.3 The Empathy-Altruism and Communal Sharing Hypotheses

The scale’s operationalization also aligns with C. Daniel Batson’s empathy-altruism hypothesis and Alan Fiske’s relational models theory. Fiske posits that communal sharing relationships are governed by a sense of equivalence, common identity, and mutual concern. Cavanaugh and colleagues theorized that activating state love temporarily induces a communal sharing orientation that can be generalized beyond primary close relationships (family, romantic partners) to embrace humanity at large, thereby driving benevolent actions toward non-proximal entities.

7. Validity

Empirical evidence for the validity of the State Love Scale has been documented through rigorous experimental and psychometric testing across multiple studies in consumer psychology and behavioral decision science.

7.1 Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by the scale’s capacity to reliably capture elevated love following diverse affective induction techniques. In Cavanaugh, Bettman, and Luce (2015), state love was experimentally induced using two distinct paradigms:

• Autobiographical Emotional Recall: Participants engaged in guided writing tasks instructing them to recall and vividly describe an experience where they felt deep love and affection. The scale scores demonstrated pronounced, statistically significant elevations in the love condition compared to neutral, pride, hope, and generalized happiness conditions.
• Visual/Narrative Media Exposure: Participants were exposed to carefully calibrated print and video advertisements engineered to evoke feelings of tender affection and family/interpersonal connection. STLOVE scores showed marked elevations uniquely responsive to the intended affective stimuli.

Convergent validity was confirmed by strong positive correlations between STLOVE scores and established indicators of interpersonal warmth, emotional resonance, and intentions to engage in relational connection (r values consistently ranging from .65 to .80, p < .001).

7.2 Discriminant Validity

A critical psychometric requirement of the STLOVE is discriminant validity against other positive emotional states. Because positive affects frequently co-occur, researchers must prove that the scale does not merely reflect generalized pleasant mood. In Study 2 and Study 4 of Cavanaugh et al. (2015), participants evaluated their feelings across parallel scales measuring happiness, hope, and pride. Analyses demonstrated that:

• The STLOVE items loaded onto an independent factor cleanly separated from state happiness items.
• Manipulations designed to induce pride or hope elevated pride and hope measures respectively, without producing significant elevation on the STLOVE.
• Conversely, love-induction manipulations selectively yielded significant spikes on the STLOVE while demonstrating distinct behavioral consequences (e.g., giving to distant outgroups) that could not be accounted for by scores on the State Happiness Scale or general positive valence.

7.3 Predictive and Criterion Validity

Criterion validity is demonstrated through behavioral outcomes. When state love was assessed via the STLOVE, higher scores directly predicted participants’ willingness to allocate real monetary funds and volunteer time to charitable organizations aiding geographically and socially distant recipients (e.g., international disaster relief, remote communities), even after controlling for baseline positive affect, demographic factors, and personal disposable income.

8. Reliability

The State Love Scale exhibits outstanding internal consistency across its published formats and experimental cohorts. In psychometric evaluation, short scales containing very few items (e.g., 2 to 3 items) inherently suffer an artificial downward penalty in Cronbach’s alpha coefficients due to the mathematical sensitivity of alpha to test length. Despite this structural constraint, the STLOVE maintains remarkably high internal consistency estimates:

8.1 Two-Item Format Reliability

In Study 2 reported by Cavanaugh et al. (2015), a college student sample (N = 65) completed the two-item STLOVE following an emotional induction procedure. The response format utilized a 9-point anchored scale (0 to 8). Reliability analysis yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of:

α = .93

An alpha coefficient of .93 for a two-item measure denotes exceptional item covariation and near-perfect consistency in tapping the underlying state love latent dimension, with inter-item correlation coefficients exceeding r = .86.

8.2 Three-Item Format Reliability

In Study 4 of the same research program, the three-item STLOVE was administered to an expanded sample of adult participants (N = 147) using a 7-point intensity scale (1 to 7). Reliability analysis demonstrated high internal consistency:

α = .86

This coefficient surpasses standard psychometric thresholds (such as Nunnally’s .70 and .80 criteria for experimental and applied behavioral research), confirming that the instrument exhibits low measurement error and high stability across diverse demographic strata.

8.3 Measurement Stability Considerations

Because the STLOVE is explicitly operationalized as a state measure, classical test-retest reliability across long intervals (e.g., weeks or months) is neither expected nor psychometrically appropriate. The instrument is engineered to be sensitive to immediate affective shifts. However, within immediate repeated-measurement blocks and pre-post manipulation testing, the scale reflects stable baseline values prior to induction and rapid, coherent increases following targeted emotional elicitation.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the State Love Scale has been investigated using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analytical approaches within the context of multi-emotion measurement models.

9.1 Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

When evaluated via exploratory factor analysis (principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood estimation with oblique rotation, such as Promax or Direct Oblimin) alongside items tapping state happiness, pride, and hope:

• The STLOVE items reliably coalesce onto a singular, distinct latent factor accounting for substantial explained variance (> 78% of the common variance among the love items).
• Primary factor loadings for the love items are exceptionally high, with standardized regression weights typically ranging between λ = .84 and λ = .95.
• Cross-loadings on companion factors (such as general happiness or excitement) remain minimal, generally staying below λ = .22, thereby satisfying strict criteria for simple structure (Thurstone, 1947).

9.2 Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

In structural equation modeling frameworks evaluating multidimensional positive affect inventories, a multi-factor model treating state love, state happiness, state pride, and state hope as distinct, inter-correlated latent factors demonstrates superior fit compared to alternative rival models:

• Rival Model 1 (Single-Factor Hedonic Model): Collapsing all positive emotion items into one general “positive valence” factor produces poor model fit, characterized by elevated root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA > .12) and diminished comparative fit indices (CFI < .80).
• Target Multi-Factor Model: The specified structure—isolating the STLOVE latent factor—exhibits excellent goodness-of-fit statistics across standard empirical criteria: Comparative Fit Index (CFI) > .97, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) > .95, Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) < .04, and RMSEA < .06.

These findings substantiate that state love functions as an independent, identifiable affective construct possessing robust psychometric distinctiveness.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The State Love Scale is characterized by the following structural and methodological attributes:

• Test Type: Self-report psychometric rating scale; state affect measurement tool.
• Primary Purpose: Assessment of acute, momentary feelings of love, affection, and subjective closeness; experimental manipulation check.
• Target Population: Adults and adolescents; suitable for collegiate, community, consumer, and online subject pools.
• Administration Format: Self-administered; compatible with paper-and-pencil questionnaires, computerized laboratory interfaces (e.g., Qualtrics, MediaLab), and mobile ambulatory platforms.
• Administration Time: Extremely rapid; approximately 30 to 60 seconds.
• Scale Configurations:
  • 2-Item Configuration: Administered with a 9-point response continuum (anchored from 0 = none to 8 = more than ever).
  • 3-Item Configuration: Administered with a 7-point response continuum (anchored from 1 = did not experience at all to 7 = experienced very intensely).
• Scoring Method:
  • Responses across the items are averaged to generate a composite State Love index. Higher mean scores indicate greater intensity of momentary state love.
  • No items are reverse-scored.
  • When utilized as a manipulation check, researchers typically compare mean STLOVE scores across experimental conditions using one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) or independent-samples t-tests, accompanied by planned orthogonal contrasts against companion positive emotion conditions.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The State Love Scale was published in 2015 within the Journal of Marketing Research by the American Marketing Association (AMA). Regarding accessibility, fee structures, and administrative permissions:

• Fee: Free for non-commercial academic research, pedagogical use, and scholarly scientific investigations.
• Permissions & Copyright: The academic article and measurement framework are copyrighted by the American Marketing Association (2015). Researchers wishing to incorporate the scale in standard academic studies typically cite the original publication by Cavanaugh, Bettman, and Luce (2015) in accordance with academic fair-use guidelines. Commercial deployment, inclusion within proprietary software platforms, or large-scale corporate applications require formal permissions from the copyright holder (American Marketing Association).
• Recommended Citation: Cavanaugh, L. A., Bettman, J. R., & Luce, M. F. (2015). Feeling love and doing more for distant others: Specific positive emotions differentially affect prosocial consumption. Journal of Marketing Research, 52(5), 657–673.

12. References

• Aron, A., Aron, E. N., & Smollan, D. (1992). Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(4), 596–612. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.63.4.596
• Batson, C. D. (2011). Altruism in humans. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195341065.001.0001
• Cavanaugh, L. A., Bettman, J. R., & Luce, M. F. (2015). Feeling love and doing more for distant others: Specific positive emotions differentially affect prosocial consumption. Journal of Marketing Research, 52(5), 657–673. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.10.0219
• Fiske, A. P. (1992). The four elementary forms of sociality: Framework for a unified theory of social relations. Psychological Review, 99(4), 689–723. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.99.4.689
• Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). What good are positive emotions? Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 300–319. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.3.300
• Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218
• Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). Love 2.0: Creating happiness and health in moments of connection. Plume / Penguin Group.
• Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and adaptation. Oxford University Press.
• Roseman, I. J. (1991). Appraisal determinants of discrete emotions. Cognition & Emotion, 5(3), 161–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939108411034
• Smith, C. A., & Ellsworth, P. C. (1985). Patterns of cognitive appraisal in emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48(4), 813–838. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.48.4.813
• Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), 1063–1070. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.6.1063

13. Items of the Scale