Contact: Donna Krupa
Office: (301) 634-7209
Cell: (703) 967-2751
dkrupa@the-aps.org
Love Really Is “All In Your Head,” Though
Intense Romantic Love Looks More Like The Brass Ring Than A Bouquet Of
Roses
Love also may be a lateralized brain
function, like speech; Links seen to stalking, suicide, clinical depression,
even autism
BETHESDA, Md. (May 31, 2005) – You just can’t tell
where you might find love these days. A team led by a neuroscientist, an
anthropologist and a social psychologist found love-related
neurophysiological systems inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine. They
detected quantifiable love responses in the brains of 17 young men and women
who each described themselves as being newly and madly in love.
The multidisciplinary team found that early, intense
romantic love may have more to do with motivation, reward and “drive”
aspects of human behavior than with the emotions or sex drive. Brain
systems were activated that humans share with other mammals. So the
researchers think “early-stage romantic love is possibly a developed form of
a mammalian drive to pursue preferred mates, and that it has an important
influence on social behaviors that have reproductive and genetic
consequences.”
Diverse emotions occur, but reward response primary
“It’s a stark reminder that the mind truly is in the
brain,” noted Lucy L. Brown of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “We
humans are built to experience magical feelings like love, but our findings
don’t diminish the magic in any way. In fact, for some, it enhances the
experience. Our research also helps to explain why a person in love feels
‘driven’ to win their beloved, amidst a whole constellation of other
feelings.”
The study, entitled “Reward, motivation and emotion
systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love,” is available
online and will be in the July issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology,
published by the American Physiological Society. The research was
conducted by Arthur Aron, Helen E. Fisher, Debra J. Mashek, Greg Strong, Hai-Fang
Li and Lucy L. Brown. Aron, Fisher and Brown contributed equally.
“Most of the participants in our study clearly showed
emotional responses,” noted Arthur Aron of the State University of New
York-Stony Brook, “but we found no consistent emotional pattern. Instead,
all of our subjects showed activity in reward and motivation regions. To
emotion researchers like me, this is pretty exciting because it’s the first
physiological data to confirm a connection between romantic love and
motivation networks in the brain.
“As it turns out, romantic love is probably best
characterized as a motivation or goal-oriented state that leads to
various specific emotions, such as euphoria or anxiety,” Aron noted. “With
this view, it becomes clearer why the lover expresses such an imperative to
pursue his or her beloved and protect the relationship.”
Sexual arousal ‘very different’; confirmation of
questionnaire methods
Aron added: “Our participants who measured very high on
a self report questionnaire of romantic love also showed strong activity in
a particular brain region – results that dramatically increase our
confidence that self-report questionnaires can actually measure brain
activity.”
Aron also noted that the research answered the
“historic question of whether love and sex are the same, or different, or
whether romantic passion is just warmed over sexual arousal.” He said, “Our
findings show that the brain areas activated when someone looks at a photo
of their beloved only partially overlap with the brain regions associated
with sexual arousal. Sex and romantic love involve quite different brain
systems.”
fMRI confirms major predictions, yields “remarkable
implications”; autism link
Aron reported that, using functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) and other measurements, he and his colleagues found support
for their two major predictions: (1) early stage, intense romantic love is
associated with subcortical reward regions rich with dopamine; and (2)
romantic love engages brain systems associated with motivation to acquire a
reward.
Brown explains some of these findings, commenting that
“when our participants looked at a photo of his/her beloved, specific
activation occurred in the right ventral tegmental area (VTA) and dorsal
caudate body. These regions were significant compared to two control
conditions, providing strong evidence that these brain areas, which are
associated with the motivation to win rewards, are central to the experience
of being in love.”
Brown noted that “an important concept is that the
caudate probably integrates huge amounts of information, everything from
early personal memories to one’s personal notions of beauty. Then, this
brain region (and related regions of the basal ganglia) helps to direct
one’s actions toward attaining one’s goals. For neuroscientists,” she said,
“these findings about the diverse regional functions of the basal ganglia in
humans have remarkable implications.”
“Our data even may be relevant to some forms of
autism,” Brown added. “Some people with autism don’t understand or
experience any sort of emotional attachment or romantic love. I would
speculate that autism involves an atypical development of the midbrain and
basal ganglia reward systems. This makes sense, too, because other symptoms
of autism include repetitive thoughts and movements, characteristics of
basal ganglia function. ”
Surprise discovery: romance is on the right,
‘attractiveness’ to the left
Another important discovery, Brown said, was that “to
our surprise, the activation regions associated with intense romantic love
were mostly on the right side of the brain, while the activation regions
associated with facial attractiveness were mostly on the left.
“We didn’t predict such a striking lateralization,”
Brown reported. “It is well known that speech is largely a left-sided
cortical function. But our data indicate that lateralization also
occurs in lower parts of the brain. Moreover, different kinds of
rewards (in this case, the “rush” of romantic love, compared with the
pleasing experience of looking at a pretty or handsome face) is also
lateralized. These results give us a lot to think about how the normal human
brain learns and remembers and functions in general,” Brown added.
Love physiology changes over time;
‘Romantic love more powerful than sex’
Another breakthrough, Brown noted, was that “we found
several brain areas where the strength of neural activity changed with the
length of the romance. Everyone knows that relationships are dynamic
over time, but we are beginning to track what happens in the brain as a love
relationship matures.”
Helen E. Fisher, a research anthropologist at Rutgers
University, New Jersey, noted that not only did the brain change as romantic
love endured, but that some of these changes were in regions associated with
pair-bonding in prairie voles. The fMRI images showed more activity in the
ventral pallidum portion of the basal ganglia in people with longer romantic
relationships. It’s in this region where receptors for the hormone
vasopressin are critical for vole pair-bonding, or attachment.
“Humans have evolved three distinct but interrelated
brain systems for mating and reproduction – the sex drive, romantic love,
and attachment to a long term partner,” Fisher said, “and our results
suggest how feelings of romantic love might change into feelings of
attachment. Our results support what people have always assumed – that
romantic love is one of the most powerful of all human experiences. It is
definitely more powerful than the sex drive.”
Depression, murder/suicide, demonstrate strength of
romantic drive
For instance, Fisher point out, “If someone rejects
your sexual overtures, you don’t harm yourself or the other person. But
rejected men and women in societies around the world sometimes kill
themselves or someone else. In fact, studies indicate that some 40% of
people who are rejected in love slip into clinical depression. Our study
may also suggest some of the underlying physiology of stalking behavior,”
she added.
Fisher noted that their study, which took barely an
hour for each participant but many years for the researchers to process and
interpret the data, also found a “fascinating continuity between human
romantic love and the physiological expressions of attraction in other
animals. Other scientists,” she said, “have reported that expressions of
attraction in a female prairie vole are associated with a 50% increase in
dopamine activity in a brain region related to regions where we found
activity. These and other data indicate that all mammals may feel
attraction to specific partners, and that some of the same brain systems are
involved.”
Study explains second half of Darwin’s puzzle,
sexual selection & ‘eyes of the beholder’
“Darwin and many of his intellectual descendants have
studied the myriad physiological ornaments that one sex of a species have
evolved to attract members of the opposite sex, like the peacock’s fancy
tail feathers that attract the peahen,” Fisher noted. “But no one has
studied what happened in the brain of the viewer, the individual that
becomes attracted to these traits. Our study indicates what happens in the
brain of the viewer as he or she becomes physiologically attracted to these
traits.”
She added, “This brain system probably evolved for an
important reason – to drive our forebears to focus their courtship energy on
specific individuals, thereby conserving precious mating time and energy.
Perhaps,” she hypothesized, “even love-at-first-sight is a basic mammalian
response that developed in other animals and our ancestors inherited in
order to speed up the mating process.”
Einstein’s Brown concluded, “Our results suggest that
romantic love does not use a functionally specialized brain system. It may
be produced, instead, by a constellation of neural systems that converge
onto widespread regions of the caudate where there is a flexible
combinatorial map representing and integrating many motivating stimuli.
“This passion may be an excellent example of how a
complex human behavioral state is processed. Moreover, taken together, our
results and those of Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki, who studied men and
women in longer love relationships, show similar cortical, VTA and caudate
activation patterns, suggesting that these regions are consistently and
critically involved in this aspect of human reproduction and social
behavior, romantic love.”
Source and funding
The study, “Reward, motivation and emotion systems
associated with early-stage intense romantic love,” is available online and
will be in the July issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology,
published by the American Physiological Society.
Research was conducted by Arthur Aron, Debra J. Mashek
and Greg Strong, Dept. of Psychology, State University of New York at Stony
Brook; Helen E. Fisher, Dept. of Anthropology, Rutgers University, New
Brunswick, New Jersey; Hai-Fang Li, SUNY Stony Brook Dept. of Radiology; and
Lucy L. Brown, Departments of Neurology and Neuroscience, Albert Einstein
College of Medicine, Yeshiva University, Bronx, New York.
Aron, Fisher and Brown contributed equally. Mashek is
now at the Dept. of Psychology, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.
Research was supported in part by a grant from the
National Science Foundation (Aron).
Editor’s note: A copy of the research paper by
Aron, Fisher, Brown et al. is available to the media. Members of the media
may obtain an electronic version and interview members of the research team
by contacting Donna Krupa at the American Physiological Society,
(301) 634-7209, cell (703) 967-2751 or
dkrupa@the-aps.org.
* * *
- APS
Conference on NEUROHYPOPHYSEAL HORMONES,
-
Vasopressin and Oxytocin:
- From
Genomics and Physiology to Disease
- July
16-20, 2005, Steamboat Springs, Colorado
* * *
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10,000 members and publishes 14 peer-reviewed journals containing almost
4,000 articles annually.
APS
provides a wide range of research, educational and career support and
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