What kind of love is love at first sight? An empirical investigation

Zsok, Florian; Haucke, Matthias; Wit, Cornelia Y. De; Barelds, Dick P. H.

doi:10.1111/pere.12218

Cited by 21 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…Romantic love can commence abruptly or build up slowly, although the phenomenon of "love at first sight" may actually be strong attraction rather than romantic love, per se (Sternberg, 1986;Zsok et al, 2017). In one study of Chinese and American participants, 38% of participants fell in love fast and 35% fell in love slow, with the remaining unknown (Riela et al, 2010).…”

Section: Romantic Love Over the Lifetimementioning

confidence: 99%

Proximate and Ultimate Perspectives on Romantic Love

2021

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Romantic love is a phenomenon of immense interest to the general public as well as to scholars in several disciplines. It is known to be present in almost all human societies and has been studied from a number of perspectives. In this integrative review, we bring together what is known about romantic love using Tinbergen’s “four questions” framework originating from evolutionary biology. Under the first question, related to mechanisms, we show that it is caused by social, psychological mate choice, genetic, neural, and endocrine mechanisms. The mechanisms regulating psychopathology, cognitive biases, and animal models provide further insights into the mechanisms that regulate romantic love. Under the second question, related to development, we show that romantic love exists across the human lifespan in both sexes. We summarize what is known about its development and the internal and external factors that influence it. We consider cross-cultural perspectives and raise the issue of evolutionary mismatch. Under the third question, related to function, we discuss the fitness-relevant benefits and costs of romantic love with reference to mate choice, courtship, sex, and pair-bonding. We outline three possible selective pressures and contend that romantic love is a suite of adaptions and by-products. Under the fourth question, related to phylogeny, we summarize theories of romantic love’s evolutionary history and show that romantic love probably evolved in concert with pair-bonds in our recent ancestors. We describe the mammalian antecedents to romantic love and the contribution of genes and culture to the expression of modern romantic love. We advance four potential scenarios for the evolution of romantic love. We conclude by summarizing what Tinbergen’s four questions tell us, highlighting outstanding questions as avenues of potential future research, and suggesting a novel ethologically informed working definition to accommodate the multi-faceted understanding of romantic love advanced in this review.

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Section: Romantic Love Over the Lifetimementioning

confidence: 99%

Proximate and Ultimate Perspectives on Romantic Love

2021

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“…From the perspective of evolutionary biology, IRA evolved to enable an individual to choose a specific mating partner that he/she prefers among potential partners, thereby reducing the waste of mating resources and increasing the individual’s chances of success in the highly competitive mating market ( Fisher et al, 2002 , 2005 ; Place et al, 2009 ). The IRA not only plays an important role in specific preferred mating partner selection, but also has a significant impact on the quality of subsequent romantic relationships ( Finkel et al, 2007 ; Hefner and Wilson, 2013 ; Zsok et al, 2017 ). Therefore, in past decades, social psychologists have conducted a large number of fruitful behavioral studies ( Luo and Zhang, 2009 ; Asendorpf et al, 2011 ; Maner and Ackerman, 2015 ; Olderbak et al, 2017 ; Gerlach and Reinhard, 2018 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Roles of P300 and Late Positive Potential in Initial Romantic Attraction

2021

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Initial romantic attraction (IRA) refers to a series of positive reactions to potential romantic partners at the initial encounter; it evolved to promote mate selection, allowing individuals to focus their mating efforts on their preferred potential mates. After decades of effort, we now have a deeper understanding of the evolutionary value and dominant factors of IRA; however, little is known regarding the brain mechanisms related to its generation and evaluation. In this study, we combined classic event-related potential analysis with dipole-source analysis to examine electroencephalogram (EEG) signals generated while participants assessed their romantic interest in potential partners. The EEG signals were categorized into IRA-engendered and unengendered conditions based on behavioral indicators. We found that the faces elicited multiple late positivities, including P300 over the occipital–parietal regions and late positive potentials (LPPs) over the anterior regions. When compared to faces that did not engender IRA, faces that did engender IRA elicited (1) enhanced P300 over the parietal regions and heightened neural activity in the insula and cingulate cortex and (2) larger LPPs over the anterior regions and heightened neural activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, frontal eye field, visual cortex, and insula. These results suggest IRA is generated and evaluated by an extensive brain network involved in emotion processing, attention control, and social evaluations. Furthermore, these findings indicate that P300 and LPP may represent different cognitive processes during IRA.

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“…The impulse of love at first sight (ILFS) is a significant initial attraction [ 1 ], that is, a strong desire to relate with another person, and is a complex phenomenon that includes evaluation, appreciation, and subjective experience of physiological changes. ILFS can be observed in many literary and artistic works.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recognition of the Impulse of Love at First Sight Based on Electrocardiograph Signal

Zhang

Yuan

et al. 2021

Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience

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The impulse of love at first sight (ILFS) is a well known but rarely studied phenomenon. Despite the privacy of these emotions, knowing how attractive one finds a partner may be beneficial for building a future relationship in an open society, where partners are accepting each other. Therefore, this study adopted the electrocardiograph (ECG) signal collection method, which has been widely used in wearable devices, to collect signals and conduct corresponding recognition analysis. First, we used photos to induce ILFS and obtained ECG signals from 46 healthy students (24 women and 22 men) in a laboratory. Second, we extracted the time- and frequency-domain features of the ECG signals and performed a nonlinear analysis. We subsequently used a feature selection algorithm and a set of classifiers to classify the features. Combined with the sequence floating forward selection and random forest algorithms, the identification accuracy of the ILFS was 69.07%. The sensitivity, specificity, F1, and area under the curve of the other parameters were all greater than 0.6. The classification of ECG signals according to their characteristics demonstrated that the signals could be recognized. Through the information provided by the ECG signals, it can be determined whether the participant possesses the desire to fall in love, helping to determine the right partner in the fastest time; this is conducive to establishing a romantic relationship.

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What kind of love is love at first sight? An empirical investigation

Cited by 21 publications

References 58 publications

Proximate and Ultimate Perspectives on Romantic Love

Proximate and Ultimate Perspectives on Romantic Love

Roles of P300 and Late Positive Potential in Initial Romantic Attraction

Recognition of the Impulse of Love at First Sight Based on Electrocardiograph Signal

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