Romantic Love Seen as Motivation @ Drive Rather Than Emotional State
By Randall Parker Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) brain scans of people in the early stages of romantic love show romantic love is less about emotions and more about rewards and the parts of the brain that control motivation. * BETHESDA, Md. (May 31, 2005) – You just can't tell where you might find love these days. A team led by a neuroscientist, an anthropologist and a social psychologist found love-related neurophysiological systems inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine. They detected quantifiable love responses in the brains of 17 young men and women who each described themselves as being newly and madly in love. * The multidisciplinary team found that early, intense romantic love may have more to do with motivation, reward and "drive" aspects of human behavior than with the emotions or sex drive. Brain systems were activated that humans share with other mammals. So the researchers think "early-stage romantic love is possibly a developed form o...