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I also wanted to thank everyone for a great discussion last week. Our conversation went in many different directions, all of which where very interesting. I find the vole studies looking at monogamy in animal models to be fascinating, and hopefully a few more people can appreciate their worth after last week. While they are not perfect models, especially since we as a species are not monogamous, I think the vasopressin and oxytocin systems and their interaction with dopamine reward systems offers us a look at what bonding is. To me, love can be qualified as an addiction, as someone pointed out in class, because of the symptoms of withdraw that you go through when it ends. Also, as Gillian said, the reward system helps to explain why you can ‘fall out of love’ and why maybe we are actually in love with the things associated with our partner and not our partner himself/herself.

I think this idea about being in love with activities with your partner and not your partner is very interesting and I can see how it may be true (and why it may not be). To address some of the questions that Elliot raises, I think that the bonding between family members that we refer to as love is not because of co-occurring activities, but something more innate. I could argue, though, that passionate, and even companion love, could be because of activities you do with your partner. Take sex as an example. We often have sex because it feels good, and we would want to continue doing so with our partner. However, over time couples have less sex and often the reason is said to be because they don’t feel like they need to anymore or because it’s just not as exciting. If we look at this in relation to the voles, maybe the bonding takes place during such sexual activities and then the same thing doesn’t satisfy anymore, so couples need to find other activities that are as rewarding. I could also argue how this may not be the case, but I’ll save that for another day.

Something curious that I didn’t bring up in class is a result Ben and I saw in the meta-analysis I did with him a few summers ago. Along with commitment, the highest predictor of relationships staying together was ‘positive allusions’, basically meaning that if you thought your relationship was better than others on many different aspects you were more likely to stay with your partner. How does this tie into our thoughts on love? I’m not sure what the neural mechanisms behind this might be, but it’s an interesting result. Perhaps people in such relationships have their reward systems working overtime and are not experiencing the habituation to their partner like other people are.

I wanted to return shortly to the idea that Dr. Grobstein brings up about the ‘science of love’ being an area of research that many different scientists can come together on. I think any topic that is able to bring different disciplines together causes stronger research to be done and deeper questions to be answered. While it is probable that the group of researchers looking at love stems from the public’s interest in such research (as we can see in our class), it still enables us to expand the literature in many different directions. I think scientists should continue to look at ‘love’, not just because of this true interaction between the disciplines, but also because the questions are important for human social societies.