Elaine Hatfield

Elaine Hatfield (formerly also known as Elaine Walster) is an American social psychologist. She has been credited, alongside Ellen S. Berscheid, as one of the pioneers of relationship science. She is employed as a professor in the psychology department of the University of Hawaii.

Hatfield received her BA in Psychology and English in 1959 from the University of Michigan and her PhD from Stanford University in 1963.

Relationship science was Hatfield's first professional research focus, beginning at the foundation of her career in the 1960s with an emphasis on human attraction and the nature of romantic love. In addition to Berscheid, she has conducted this research with a number of colleagues, including Leon Festinger, Elliot Aronson, first husband William Walster, whom she met while at Stanford University,Russell D. Clark, and Susan Sprecher. The "Passionate Love Scale" Hatfield and Sprecher developed in 1986 is one of the most widely used in the field.

Hatfield's research in the area has not been without controversy—in 1975, the $84,000 grant she was awarded by the National Science Foundation became the focus of the first Golden Fleece Award for wasteful government spending by then United States Senator William Proxmire. Due to Proxmire's campaign, the funding was rescinded. Undaunted, Hatfield went on to write or co-write many books and papers based on her research, among them A New Look at Love, which won the American Psychological Foundation's National Media Award, and the often-cited Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality article "Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers" (1989).

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