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The Neuroscience of Love
Can You Love Your Dog More Than Your Baby?
Each week on TestTubePlus, we pick one topic and cover it from multiple angles. This series will be taking a deeper look at the science of love and human connection. Over these five episodes, host Trace Dominguez will be talking about how love affects us, the different types of love, and how people express love differently. So far, Trace has explained how the different stages of love affect our body, the difference between the love we feel for our pets versus the love we feel for our offspring, and the importance of physical touch in a relationship. Today, what does science say about love at first sight, and can it help us fall in love faster?
Love at first sight is something we've all of. There are arguments against the idea, i.e., you don't have sufficient knowledge about the person, their characteristics, demeanor, etc. While the person may be attractive, we need more than that to fall in "romantic love".
While these arguments seem valid, they may not be entirely true we tend to apply our own idea of the person's characteristics through stereotypical evaluations. According to Aaron Ben-Zeév Ph.D, the former President of the University of Haifa, love at first sight is an intense form of romantic love that just could blossom into more if the person's characteristics match the assumptions the person made about the other's character.
According to a study led by Coreen Farris of Indiana University, "Young men just find it difficult to tell the difference between women who are being friendly and women who are interested in something more." Sometimes flirting is so subtle that men are trying to paint every communication with a large brush. The study examined non-verbal communication in a group of 280 male and female undergrad students. The research subjects viewed images of women/men on a computer screen and had subjects categorize each as either "friendly", "sexually interested", "sad", or "rejecting". The study found that it wasn't just guys who thought the smallest, non-verbal cues were come ons: The opposite was also found to be true: They thought that some girl's sexual advances were just them being friendly. The study ultimately concluded that women categorized men's intentions more correctly than men. So, people's messages get mixed up when they're flirting.
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Is Love at First Sight Possible? (Psychology Today)
"There are many reports about love at first sight. Thus, Carla Bruni said that it was love at first sight between her and the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. She said that what happened 'between Nicolas and me was not quick, it was instant. So for us, [the wedding] was actually very slow.',"
Divorce rate cut in half for newlyweds who discussed 5 relationship movies (Eureka Alert)
"Discussing five movies about relationships over a month could cut the three-year divorce rate for newlyweds in half, researchers report. The study, involving 174 couples, is the first long-term investigation to compare different types of early marriage intervention programs."
I like my dog, does my dog like me? (Applied Animal Behaviour)
"In this study, the possibility of there being an association between how an owner perceives his/her relationship to their dog and the way the dog experiences the relationship to its owner was investigated using two well-established methods within the anthrozoology literature."
Patterns of Brain Activation when Mothers View Their Own Child and Dog: An fMRI Study (PLOSone)
"Neural substrates underlying the human-pet relationship are largely unknown. We examined fMRI brain activation patterns as mothers viewed images of their own child and dog and an unfamiliar child and dog."
This Is Your Brain on Heartbreak (Greater Good)
"As most of us know all too well, when you're reeling from the finale of a romantic relationship that you didn't want to end, your emotional and bodily reactions are a tangle: You're still in love and want to reconcile, but you're also angry and confused; simultaneously, you're jonesing for a "fix" of the person who has abruptly left your life, and you might go to dramatic, even embarrassing, lengths to get it, even though part of you knows better."
Study: Women hurt more by breakups but recover more fully (Eureka Alert)
"Women experience more emotional pain following a breakup, but they also more fully recover, according to new research from Binghamton University. Researchers from Binghamton University and University College London asked 5,705 participants in 96 countries to rate the emotional and physical pain of a breakup on a scale of one (none) to 10 (unbearable)."