The neural basis of romantic love

Abstract

The neural correlates of many emotional states have been studied, most recently through the technique of fMRI. However, nothing is known about the neural substrates involved in evoking one of the most overwhelming of all affective states, that of romantic love, about which we report here. The activity in the brains of 17 subjects who were deeply in love was scanned using fMRI, while they viewed pictures of their partners, and compared with the activity produced by viewing pictures of three friends of similar age, sex and duration of friendship as their partners. The activity was restricted to foci in the medial insula and the anterior cingulate cortex and, subcortically, in the caudate nucleus and the putamen, all bilaterally. Deactivations were observed in the posterior cingulate gyrus and in the amygdala and were right-lateralized in the prefrontal, parietal and middle temporal cortices. The combination of these sites differs from those in previous studies of emotion, suggesting that a unique network of areas is responsible for evoking this affective state. This leads us to postulate that the principle of functional specialization in the cortex applies to affective states as well.

“I love you forever (more or less)” – stability and change in adolescents’ romantic love status and associations with mood states

“…First, for those stably in love over the 8-month period (INLOVESTABLE; mean duration of relationship: 20.3 months), hypomania scores decreased. This observation is in line with findings 11,13,14 that the early stage of romantic love does fade among adolescents, 22 young adults, 13 and adults, 12,14 and we interpret the decline in hypomania scores among those adolescents stably in love as indicating a decrease in romantic love intensity. This, in turn, may reflect the transition from early-stage intense romantic love to a more companionate love.…”

“…Among adults, periods ranging from 7 months 12 to 12-24 months 13 to 2.3 years 14 have been reported. Among adolescents, to the best of our knowledge, only Brand et al 11 have addressed this question; they reported an interval of 7 to 9 months.…”

Grapheme-color synesthetes show peculiarities in their emotional brain: cortical and subcortical evidence from VBM analysis of 3D-T1 and DTI data

“…As mentioned above, putamen is one of the areas of the brain which appears repeatedly in emotion-related experiments (Maddock 1999). Furthermore, this basal ganglion has been described as part of the hate circuit (Zeki and Romaya 2008), and it contributes to the pattern of activation that arises when studying the neural correlates of romantic love (Bartels and Zeki 2000).…”

Activation of μ-Opioid Receptors in the Dorsal Striatum is Necessary for Adult Social Attachment in Monogamous Prairie Voles

“…There is an increasingly broad range of evidence in human and nonhuman primate studies showing that the dorsal striatum is involved in socially relevant, functional roles such as positive and negative emotions (Lane et al, 1997), response to emotional faces (Morris et al, 1996), romantic love (Bartels and Zeki, 2000;Aron et al, 2005), reward expectation (Kawagoe et al, 1998), and reward learning (O'Doherty, 2004;Delgado et al, 2005). The dorsal striatum is well positioned to integrate information pertaining to cognition and reward with motor control circuits and to potentiate specific motor outputs (Balleine et al, 2007).…”