I shake it like jello, I make the boys say hello
Romantic love is also associated, particularly in early stages, with specific physiological, psychological, and behavioral indices that have been described and quantified by psychologists and others. These include emotional responses such as euphoria, intense focused attention on a preferred individual, obsessive thinking about him or her, emotional dependency on and craving for emotional union with this beloved, and increased energy. Tennov (1979) coined the term “limerance” for this special state, and Hatfield and Sprecher (1986) developed a questionnaire scale to measure it. The universality, euphoria, and focused attention of romantic love suggest that reward and motivation systems in the human brain could be involved.
In addition, cross-cultural descriptions of romantic love regularly include reward-related images and suggest strong motivation to win a specific mating partner. For example, the oldest love poem from Summeria, “Inanna and Dumuzi,” dating ∼4,000 yr ago and found on cuneiform tablets in the Uruk language is translated, “My beloved, the delight of my eyes…” (Wolkstein and Kramer 1983). From the Song of Songs, the Hebrew 10th century poem comes, “…your love is more wonderful than wine …the sound of your name is perfume … . I sought the one my soul loves…” (Wolkstein and Kramer 1983). Furthermore, among the ethnographies canvassed in the review of Jankowiak and Fischer (1992) is one by Harris (1995) who cited evidence of the yearning for love and the motivation to win the beloved among the peoples of Mangaia, Cook Islands, Polynesia. These people have a word for “dying for love.” […]
Several results support our two predictions that 1) early stage, intense romantic love is associated with subcortical reward regions that are also dopamine-rich (e.g., Fisher 1998) and 2) romantic love engages a motivation system involving neural systems associated with motivation to acquire a reward rather than romantic love being a particular emotion in its own right (Aron and Aron 1991). […]
One of the most interesting findings of this study is regional effects related to the number of months in love. Notably, several limbic cortical regions showed a correlation with the length of the relationship: anterior and posterior cingulate, mid-insula, and retrosplenial cortex; but also, parietal, inferior frontal, and middle temporal cortex. […] these results highlight the importance of these cortical regions for processing stimulus/internal state change, and the importance of taking time factors into account in future studies of human relationships. At the same time, these results must be interpreted cautiously because they are cross-sectional, so that, for example, it is possible they represent differences in the kinds of people that remain intensely in love over a longer period rather than changes over time.
