Mismatch negativity tells you how much you automatically care for your lover’s love

Abstract

IntroductionLove is a fundamental human experience which involves commitment, intimacy and passion between lovers [1][2][3]. Normal love creates strong family and social bonds, but pathological love, repetitive and uncontrolled attention and care towards one's partner [4] in erotomania, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, brings burden to patients' families and to society [5]. Under such circumstances, the patients often use automatic thinking in response to environmental stimuli and excessively seek out love-related information [4,6].Studies have shown that love is involved in attention-related processing, such as reward, emotion, cognition, orientation or goal-directed motivation, which is based on its cerebral chemical correlates [7][8][9][10][11][12].Using one of the neuroimaging techniques, the functional magnetic resonance imaging On the other hand, according to the best of our knowledge, there have been no studies addressing the early cognition of love oriented to a participant by their lover yet. As love is a goal-direct state towards an individual's beloved [7][8][9], perception and expression of love from the beloved would be sought after by their lover. In such a case, love related information expressed by an individual's own lover might be detected earlier in that individual. In our current study, MISMATCH NEGATIVITY TELLS YOU HOW MUCH YOU AUTOMATICALLY CARE FOR YOUR LOVER'S LOVE AbstractUnderstanding the automatic process of love oriented to a participant by his or her own lover helps to build a normal loving relationship. It also helps to elucidate some of the underlying mechanisms of pathological love, which involves both repetitive and uncontrolled attention and care. Previous studies have addressed the late-stage process of love, but its early or automatic stage has been studied less. When processing a change in speech from "love" to "love you" from their own lover, participants showed a more prefrontal-frontal distribution of cerebral mismatch negativity. Source analysis showed that the left superior temporal gyrus was involved in all participants. The right inferior frontal gyrus was additionally involved in some participants who evaluated love as more intense. Brain areas activated in process might inversely indicate how much a participant cares about the love oriented by their lover. Keywords