Almeida, Thiago de (2017). The concept of love: an exploratory study through a brazilian sample. Thesis (PhD in Psychology). Psychology Institute of the University of São Paulo, São Paulo. Study love scientifically is a hard task because of methodological difficulties and conceptual improperties intrinsically related to this type of investigation. Because it can be considered such a familiar concept, many researchers agree about what is love and how it can be measured. But, this is not what actually occurs. After all, what is love? Is it, as a psychological phenomenon, capable of being scientifically studied by psychology? The present study aims to study love empirically and had as objectives: (1) to identify the characteristics most commonly attributed and / or associated to the word love by Brazilian people of different ages and social conditions, and (2) to check if there are differences statistically significant according to the variables: gender, age group and school level. A total of 600 people (390 women-65%, 209 men-34.83%) participated in this study, with the mean age of 23.82 years, distributed in seven groups according to the city of origin of the collection and the school level of the participants. At the collection stage, held collectively, participants were asked to make free associations about 'LOVE' in 90 seconds. With the collected material, all participants' answers were typed, separated and tabulated. Subsequently, 14 categories were created, later independently evaluated by five judges chosen by the proponent of this study. For this study, the reliability of the answers among the judges was 92.5%, indicating a high agreement between the contents of the categories. The data were statistically analyzed by the Kruskal-Wallis test and the Spearman Correlation Coefficient. The results were discussed according to the theory of concepts called theoretical vision. The analysis of the results shows that: (1) as time goes by, people associate love more with positive representations and less with romantic ones, family and friendship aspects; (2) women associate, more than men, love related with friendship, family, animals, as a source of positive emotions, attitudes and behaviors; (3) the higher level of education of the participants, make them associate love with positive aspects.