How do I know when to choose between Spearman's $\rho$ and Pearson's $r$? My variable includes satisfaction and the scores were interpreted using the sum of the scores. However, these scores could also be ranked. 
If you want to explore your data it is best to compute both, since the relation between the Spearman (S) and Pearson (P) correlations will give some information. Briefly, S is computed on ranks and so depicts monotonic relationships while P is on true values and depicts linear relationships.

As an example, if you set:  

x=(1:100);  
y=exp(x);                         % then,
corr(x,y,'type','Spearman');      % will equal 1, and 
corr(x,y,'type','Pearson');       % will be about equal to 0.25


This is because $y$ increases monotonically with $x$ so the Spearman correlation is perfect, but not linearly, so the Pearson correlation is imperfect.  

corr(x,log(y),'type','Pearson');  % will equal 1


Doing both is interesting because if you have S > P, that means that you have a correlation that is monotonic but not linear. Since it is good to have linearity in statistics (it is easier) you can try to apply a transformation on $y$ (such a log).

I hope this helps to make the differences between the types of correlations easier to understand.
