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There are a lot of interesting topics that have already been raised above by others, but I wanted to write a little about a point that was brought up by Tamara and addressed by Alex at the beginning of class, which is the fact that there are multiple forms of love.  While I think they were talking about different kinds of love like romantic love, maternal love and friendship, I think it is also interesting that love exists in very different forms between different cultures.  For instance, even after living in the States for almost four years now, I am still amazed by the fact that people in this country seem to have a very strong form of love with their parents.  It always surprises me to hear people end their phone conversations with their parents with "I love you"  since I do not think most Japanese people would be thinking about love when they are talking to their parents (at least I don't).  It also seems that couples here have much higher expectations for their love relationship.  In Japan, when male workers have to work abroad, many decide on "tanshinfunin" without hesitation.  That is, if the spouse and family wish to stay in Japan, the father lives abroad for a couple of years on his own.  This is different from a separation and is totally acceptable in Japan, but I have heard that it is an unthinkable notion in western countries. 

I am wondering whether different forms of love can exist between different countries just because of our different believes and customs or whether there is some neuronal basis too. My guess is that while culture probably plays a huge part in creating the difference, there is at least some difference in how our mind operates too.  The reason why I suspect this is because I think that different forms of love exist between cultures due to the different language we speak, and as we know, there seems to be a lot of linkage between language and how our mind operates. I have always thought that English and many Latin languages are very affectionate. There are words and phrases like "home-sickness" and "I miss you" that people in western countries use all the time, though these words do not exist in many Asian languages.  Thus, I have probably never really felt homesick when I think of my family in Japan.  To give another example (and I am sorry that a lot of my examples are personal anecdotes) once I was replying to an email that my friend had sent me from an internet cafe.  This email was from a guy who I usually talk to in Japanese, but since he was traveling and couldn't read Japanese emails in internet cafes, we had to exchange emails in English.  I love the English phrase "I miss you" and use it all time to end messages that I write to people that I haven't seen in a while.  Thus, I ended my email to him with this phrase without thinking too much.  After I had typed up the email in English, I reread my email; however, this time I had switched to thinking in Japanese.  When I reread the email with a Japanese mind-set, I could not believe I had used such an embarrassing phrase to end an email to this person! I find it interesting that the mind can accept a form of affectionate behavior when in one stage, while it can't in another and I think it would be interesting to examine whether there are neuronal differences between different forms of love.