Love can take many forms: it can be parental, it can appear in the form of friendship or as a crush. It can also be the love for a pet or the admiration for nature. A new study, published this Monday (26), showed that each of these forms of love can “light up” different parts of the brain.
The discovery was made by researchers at Aalto University in Finland and was published in the journal Cerebral Cortex. They used MRI scans to measure the brain activity of 55 fathers who were also in a romantic relationship.
The survey was conducted while participants reflected on stories related to six different types of love: love for children, love for a romantic partner, love for friends, love for strangers, love for pets, and love for nature.
“We now provide a more comprehensive picture of the brain activity associated with different types of love than previous research,” said Pärttyli Rinne, a philosopher and researcher who led the study, in a press release. “The pattern of activation for love is generated in social situations in the basal ganglia, the midline of the forehead, the precuneus and the temporoparietal junction on the sides of the back of the head,” he explains.
Love for children generated the most intense brain activity, followed closely by romantic love.
“In parental love, there was profound activation in the brain’s reward system in the striatum area [estrutura nos gânglios da base do cérebro] while imagining love, and this was not seen in any other type of love,” says Rinne.
In the forms of interpersonal love—for a romantic partner or for friends—the brain areas activated were very similar, the researchers found, with differences only in the intensity of activation. All types of interpersonal love activated areas of the brain associated with social cognition.
On the other hand, love for strangers was the least rewarding and caused the least brain activation. Love for nature activated the brain’s reward system and visual areas of the organ, but not the social areas.
Study identifies pet owners by brain activity caused by love
According to the researchers, the love associated with pets led to brain activity associated with sociability. By encouraging participants to imagine themselves at home with a pet, they were able to tell who owned a pet and who didn’t through brain activity.
“When you look at pet love and the brain activity associated with it, the brain areas associated with sociability statistically reveal whether or not a person is a pet owner. In pet owners, these areas are more activated than in non-pet owners,” Rinne says.
Love activations were controlled in the study with neutral stories in which very little happened, such as staring out the bus window or absentmindedly brushing one’s teeth. After hearing a professional actor’s interpretation of each “love story,” participants were asked to imagine each emotion for ten seconds.
For the researchers, understanding the neural mechanisms of love could help guide philosophical discussions about the nature of love, consciousness and human connection. In addition, they hope the work will improve mental health interventions for conditions such as attachment disorders, depression or relationship problems.
This content was originally published in How does love affect the brain? New study may have the answer on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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