The Science of Romance

Okay, I know there has been some dispute about whether or not “Love” should be researched as a science, but truth be told, I don’t want to touch that. Frankly, my opinion is if there is interest in the scientific community as well as the money to fund research, let them research! However there are some sub-aspects relating to attraction that I would be very interested in finding the basis of, primarily the neurobiological bases that underlie attraction. Also interesting to investigate would be as Liz mentioned in an earlier note: what is the biological basis for becoming accustomed to our partners? (Sidenote: I, like Emily, simply want the “answer” and for me this is generally the biological basis behind what we do.) And as Elliot addressed in his post: could we reduce the way we feel about someone to neurotransmitter release or an enzyme cascade? If we were to reduce these complex emotions into their biological constructs, what could we do with this information? Could we develop drugs to cure the pain post break-up, or use agonists to enhance the way we feel about someone? Essentially, we could alter our current paradigm of love; change it from something to be aspired, to make it something as mundane as a duty to be performed.

Something that I found to be perplexing was the idea, which Professor Le brought up, that we are not monogamous by nature. What then is the primary purpose of marriage? Does it benefit us or the species in a specific way so much so that we need it for our continued survival? I asked a question in class about the rates of break-up of long-term cohabiting couples for a reason-I am interested in whether they naturally assume the characteristics of married couples, in that they have the same strong commitments despite the lack of a legally binding relationship. It seems to me that though they have a lessened legal investment, would bonds of trust be more lasting because of the conscious decision to abstain from marriage? (I apologize if that did not make sense.) Does strong emotional commitment make or break a relationship, or is it all based on the exchange of investments?

On a final note, I find the results obtained by Ben and Amelia a bit humorous, a bit of a “keeping up with the Joneses” of relationships. Perhaps when we view our relationship as better than those around us, we downgrade the quality of our alternatives, as we view other local relationships as possibilities of what our relationship might be like. The better these relationships look to us, the less positively we view our relationships, and thus we are less likely to stay in it. Just a thought.

First of all I would like to thank everyone for their thoughtful discussion both in class and in the forum. Our group set out to pick an ambiguous concept like love for the very reason that it would spark a great deal of debate about the tie-in between environment, psychology, and biology. I’d like to start by addressing the concern that some of you have expressed in terms of science “demystifying” or “dissecting” the concept of love. I personally believe that a person can strive to understand the interplay between the environmental and biological factors that underlie a specific cognitive or emotional state while simultaneously enjoying it! As we have seen, both in our own experiences and over the course of discussion, love is by its very nature an irrational and capricious emotion. And while science is making strides to understand the underlying framework upon which love is based, the end product can still take your breath away. To use another example, I spent a semester learning about the science of rollercoasters. I now know that gravity, track angles, breaks, etc. contribute to a rollercoaster’s function, but when I strap myself into a car it still takes my breath away. I think that love is similar; The emotion is defined by the complex interplay between biology (as Emily and Gillian discuss), cultural and environmental influences (as Liz and Natsu discuss in their posts), and also by the way we choose to deal with the emotion on a conscious level (as Jenna addresses in her post). Even taking these things into consideration, there is no reason why it can’t still feel magical. Due to the complexity of the emotion, I agree with Jessica’s point that there may indeed be no such thing as “true love.” At the same time, I believe that aspects of love appear to be universal: Human empathy, the formation of social hierarchy, and sexual feelings to name a few.

Another point that has been brought up is how animal models (like the voles) explain human relationships. Again, it is important to understand that these studies do not attempt to summarily explain the complexity of human monogamy, but rather show that neurophysiology appears to have at least a partial role in human bond pairs. As an animal researcher, I am often asked about how my work is “practical,” or directly relates to the human condition. To use the vole study as an example, voles do not have sex for the same reasons that human do. As far as we can tell, voles do not have sex because they are bored, or as an affair as a way to show a spouse that the marriage is over. Human sexuality is almost hopelessly complex, but the important thing to understand when trying to parse out the reasons for emotions like love and jealousy is the concept of proximal versus ultimate goals. We have sex for many different reasons: We’re bored, we’re in love, we’re jealous, we’re tying to have a baby, it feels good, we had too much to drink, etc. These are all proximal reasons- in very few instances are you thinking “I want to propagate the survival of my species” when you are flirting with an attractive stranger. Yet I believe that the only, the only way that these behaviors make sense is by putting them into perspective, to find the ultimate reason for why these traits have been passed down over thousands of generations of successful maters. And the reason is reproduction. Paul and Jessica have both brought up interesting counter-examples to these points, talking about other goals that lead up to or occur during sex. I would argue, however, that while love-related euphoria and the female orgasm may stem from a more basic reward-pathway or social framework, both of these systems evolved over time because they facilitated survival of younger generations (either by rewarding sex or the formation of a dyadic pair with a cocaine-like high, or increasing the chances that a mate will stick around to enjoy additional bouts of superior sex).

Finally, I’d like to address Paul’s comment about the reasons for this type of social research. I think that concepts like love are too complex to rationally define at this point in time, either in a scientific or political forum. Yet the latter has already done so by restricting the rights of homosexuals, including marriage. I wish that we had had more opportunity to discuss gay marriage in class, and the current stance on gay versus straight love. I think that additional research may help show that, in fact, there are no differences in the way that homosexual couples feel about one another, and that they deserve the same opportunities that heterosexual couples enjoy in our society. I’ll leave off at this point (this post is getting very long!) but I’d love to hear other thoughts about why this type of research is needed.

~Alex Tuttle

Haverford '08

 In our discussion on Tuesday we focused a lot on whether love evolved because it resulted in more reproductive success and usually equated monogamy with love.  However, I don’t think we can really relate the monogamy voles exhibit to love in humans because it is very possible to have love without monogamy and monogamy without love.  If the emotion of love never existed I think that people would still stay together to raise their children and gain mutual health advantages.  In our society today many people say they are in love but are not monogamous.  Although I can see that evolutionary survival advantage of monogamy, I don’t know if there is a clear advantage for love.  Mostly I think the best thing about love is that it makes people feel good and strengthens a community and family unit.  Strengthening a family unit could increase reproductive success, however a community and family unit could function without it and therefore I think the most important reason people feel they need love is because it makes them feel good.  This leads into the discussion of whether love is an addiction and I think it is in that people (and most organisms) inherently want more of what makes them feel good.  This is not necessarily a trait that will allow a person to be more reproductively successful but it is still an important part of our nature.  

To abruptly change topics, I’d like to address the question of whether it is important to pursue love research.  I agree with the idea that all research is worth looking into because you never know what you will find, however at the same time I don’t think there is really much to do on love.  I think the only reason most people are interested in love research is because they want help finding the “perfect” match, but ultimately love is such a subjective feeling that it will always be different for each person.  Yes, certain brain areas may light up to give this general feeling, but I think what causes these areas to become active are very different for each person.  I think places such as eHarmony could only seem effective at making matches because all the people are committed to finding love and perhaps that is the most important factor in making a long lasting match. 

Finally, I’d like to add that in all of these discussions I’ve found myself having difficulty accepting that love is purely a biological/cultural/psychological phenomenon and therefore this topic has been one of the hardest for me to discuss.  I don’t want to believe that I only love someone until I have sucked all the “newness” out of them.  I am a person who loves romantic comedies and strongly (and probably naively) believes that love should have the magical quality seen in the movie and can last forever despite the current 50% divorce rate.  Thus, I’ve found all of our conversations about love inherently lacking because we don’t (or can’t) address what makes it so enchanting and special.

Hi guys, one thing that we did not get to discuss in depth on tuesday were the articles that described the health benefits and risks of being in a relationship, namely of marraige.  The articles, though more pop-science, brought up an interesting topic in my mind that seems to play into the "evolutionary adaptiveness of love" that we spoke about a little on tuesday.  The articles seemed to express that on the whole it is advantageous, healthwise, to be in a relationship because this situation provides, if not directly then indirectly, more health benefits than being single (if not for the simple reason that two heads are better than one when it comes to recognizing illness and getting the motivation to treat it). 

The discussion about whether being in love or having a significant other is evolutionarily adaptive purely because of the reproductive aspect seems to tie in to this discussion of health benefits.  Although I do think that in the end, our emotions surrounding love for a partner at their base are tied to the need for sexual reproduction, it is not hard to imagine that the health benefits of being in a relationship could play a role in the evolutionary adaptiveness of love as well.  It may be that throughout time those of our ancestors that were able to commit to a long term relationship, possibly spurred on by the emotions tied to love, had better health outcomes. 

However, as I was thinking this idea through, an article that was presented in Wendy Sternberg's pain psychology class came to mind that, while not completely refuting this notion, at least brought its validity into question.  It seems that researchers found that patients with severe back pain actually had higher ratings of pain and more overt pain behavior when their spouse's were more "solicitous", meaning that they were more willing on a regular basis to dote on their wife or husband in pain.  It seems then that spouse's whose love for their partners spurrs them to (perhaps obsessively) monitor and aid their spouse's condition, actually makes things not better, but worse for their spouse.  It is hard to imagine how this kind of mechanism would make love evolutionarily adaptive.  Anyways, just thoughts to throw out there!  Good job Alex, Amelia and Stephanie!

There are many potentially interesting ways to further our discussion from Tuesday, but I’d first like to somewhat address one of Professor Grobstein’s questions – what are the benefits and costs of researching the science of romance? This closely relates to Emily’s question of what are we to actually do with the information we discover? As we discussed in class, romantic love is something highly personal and individualized, but also somewhat universal. There are many commonalities that can be drawn between individuals’ descriptions of their “love”. As Professor Le stated, these specific aspects and commonalities are what he and most of his peers in the field study – directly tackling something as multi-faceted and broad as love sounds like an impossible task. However, assuming that we can actually determine the underlying neurological aspects of love, the cultural influence from a societal level, the genetic contribution, the personal experiences in one’s life that influence how one “loves,” etc., I’m not sure I would even want to know it all. There’s something interesting, mysterious, even attractive about the inability to fully understand and describe love. I guess knowing all of these things might not necessarily encompass what it actually feels like to love someone. But getting close to the point of trying to break love down into many describable parts seems to somewhat ruin the wonderful, indescribable aspect of love. Maybe I’d just get used to it, and learning more about the neurological bases of love might help science and people in some way in the future, but I kind of like the way I currently think (and don’t know how to think) about “love”.

Something else that I found truly fascinating that came up during class was the idea that people in love might not actually love their partner, but rather the co-occurrences and experiences that accompany that person. I remember learning the couples who seek out activities and do new things together usually stay together longer and are happier with their relationship as compared to couples who do not create such bonding activities. However, I never thought of it as simply being in love with those activities. In many ways, I think this idea is true. It makes sense that someone loves what they do with his/her partner and how that person makes him/her feel. On the other hand, there again seems something disheartening or unsatisfactory about that answer. Maybe it’s just that I (and I think many others) like to think about love as more than just the right mixture of activities and feelings. I’m curious as to what other people think. Do you agree that loving someone is really about loving the co-occurrences that you get by being with them? Is that true for all kinds of love? Does it lessen how you think/feel about love?

Finally, I just thought I’d let everyone know that the coverstory on Scientific American Mind this week is titled “Why We Kiss.” It’s an interesting article that definitely relates to our topic this past week. Thanks for a great discussion and see you all soon!

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.

Okay, so the most interesting thought that I had about last night’s discussion is completely tangential to the questions posed above, so I’m going to try to answer a few of those first. To address Paul’s question about whether or not we should be funding “science of love” research, my answer is definitely “yes”. It seems to me that knowledge is worth pursuing if for no other reason than pursuing knowledge; we never know what’s going to come out of it and what findings we may stumble upon that hold infinite potential. Granted, that’s an answer that’s applicable to all sciences… For the “science of love” specifically, I think that there will always be a drive to understand the forces that power our society and dictate (at least to some extent) the interactions between humans. It’s an experience that seems to be somewhat universal despite being highly subjective and individualized. And with so much hate and anger and war in this world, why not expend some energy trying to understand some of the more positive forces driving human action?

The other comment that I want to address before moving on is whether or not eharmony’s practices are “Scientific.” While I do see the difficulties that arise from this groups’ unwillingness to subject their methods to peer-review, it seems unreasonable to me to declare their practices unscientific. It undermines the very real research by respected experimental psychologists and implies that they’re not contributing to the fields of personality and social psychology. In reality, while their specific techniques are not being made public, they are promoting the idea that matching people according to dimensions of personality and beliefs can be effective, and this alone will promote further examination into this phenomenon by other research groups. (And considering the state of funding for social and personality psychology research, I certainly can’t condemn researchers for turning to private institutions for employment).

Now for my tangent… Tuesday night I had a little flashback to intro psych where I remember Ben telling us about cognitive merging. “Cognitive merging” occurs when you and your significant other gradually start thinking like your partner and kind of fuse together mentally. For example, if my boyfriend likes hot wings and I don’t really care for them when we start dating, as the relationship goes on I may dislike them less and less. Eventually when you give us surveys about our likes and dislikes, interests, etc., our answers reflect those of our partners. (This stuck with me because it was a really terrifying idea to me that I would loose part of myself by getting too involved in a relationship).

So it was really interesting to me in the discussion of the break-up when Ben said one of the major factors behind breaking up is the idea that we just get bored with our partner because there’s nothing new about them. If after two or three (or seven) years we’ve come to incorporate aspects of their personality into our own and cognitively merged with them, then does that mean that we’re really getting bored with ourselves? Our brain has sucked all that it can out of our partner and is ready to move on to suck more out of the next person? It leaves me with a mental image of our brains as parasitic zombies looking to feed off the brains of others… Although if this is the case, then I guess the answer to the breaking-up = advantageous question would be yes.

Yay for love and zombie brains. (and thanks stephanie, ameilia, & alex for a really interesting topic!)

There were so many things that were brought up last class that I was interested in hearing what everyone else thought about tht I figured I would actually post early (a rare occurence!) in order to get responses.

One thing that was really interesting to me was the whole idea of "falling out of love." if love is truly a biological thing, as combined with a sociocultural phenomenon, then my correct number of receptors needed to fall in love should be enough to stay in love. the point was brought up here that though the research was good, it doesnt really address all the neuronal connections that go on to regulate hormones and receptor levels etc to create the "neural capacity" to love. I think these factors, and their relationship to the environment, is interesting. Can we really, with enough study, figure out the exact neural pathways for such a complex emotion? And, to somewhat address Professor Grobstein's point, would we really want to expend the time and energy? For exmaple, we talked about perception of alternatives as being one of the greatest indicators of commitment (Professor Le's research). Could we find out exactly how the brain decides when it perceives alternatives, which, assuming the other research we read was correct, would then go on to change our "receptors of love"? And if we find all of this out (admittedly far into the future), what do we then do with teh information? This information would become a very interesting, and potentially dangerous, societal phenomenon. If we could make people love each other neurochemically we would have a whole SLEW of issues to deal with.

The other thing that I really wanted to comment on was the question that kept being raised by the presenters: "Romantic love as an addiction" because it acts throught the same reward pathways. First, like I mentioned in class, I'm not sure I agree with the whole reverse engineering an evolutionary reason for soemthing. We have no proof that just because it makes sense that love might be rewarding in order to pass on our genetic material (ex. more copulation, better support for the offspring in a 2 parent system), we have no actual proof that evolution acted as such. Evolution is a RANDOM event, and the selective pressures at the time our theorized "monogamy gene" (if we are even monogamous, which was brought into question) could be far different than those we hypothesize about today. Also, in terms of ideaological process, I somewhat question the idea that just because the same area is activated we can conclusively decide that the pathways are linked. It just seems liek a stretch to me, considering how little we know about the actual neural circuitry, and the lack of highly specific imaging techniques. Also, the possibility to create a theory around the results is worrisome: had different brain areas lit up, say the match the areas for something like analysis, I think we would have found a quite different yet also plausible theory, say about how true romantic love requires our higher order thinking to be activated. i think love as an addiction is an interesting idea, but I was somewhat unconvinced by the research behind it.

Sorry for such a long post, im interested to hear what you all thought!

Emily