Seduction, Stalking, and Love...
The Differences & Similarities
Kevin Hogan
Page 4
So is Love an Emotion?
What he's saying is that romantic love is NOT an emotion. It is something that is associated with emotions that DIFFER from person to person. The common thread of romantic love is the reward and motivation network activation in the brain. (Addiction/pleasure)"As it turns out, romantic love is probably best characterized as a motivation or goal-oriented state that leads to various specific emotions, such as euphoria or anxiety," Aron noted.
"With this view, it becomes clearer why the lover expresses such an imperative to pursue his or her beloved and protect the relationship."
(The lover is addicted. And again, I don't use that word in a bad light. You could used "magnetized," perhaps.)
Sexual Arousal versus Romantic Love
Aron added: "Our participants who measured very high on a self report questionnaire of romantic love also showed strong activity in a particular brain region -- results that dramatically increase our confidence that self-report questionnaires can actually measure brain activity."
Aron also noted that the research answered the "historic question of whether love and sex are the same, or different, or whether romantic passion is just warmed over sexual arousal." He said, "Our findings show that the brain areas activated when someone looks at a photo of their beloved only partially overlap with the brain regions associated with sexual arousal. Sex and romantic love involve quite different brain systems."
Sexual desire and arousal are NOT the same as romantic love. The sex drive and the desire to love and bond are two different things.
Love is a Motivational Addiction (so says the brain)
Aron reported that, using (fMRI) and other measurements, he and his colleagues found support for their two major predictions: (1) early stage, intense romantic love is associated with subcortical reward regions rich with dopamine; and (2) romantic love engages brain systems associated with motivation to acquire a reward.
Brown explains some of these findings, commenting that "when our participants looked at a photo of his/her beloved, specific activation occurred in the right ventral tegmental area (VTA) and dorsal caudate body. These regions were significant compared to two control conditions, providing strong evidence that these brain areas, which are associated with the motivation to win rewards, are central to the experience of being in love."
In plain English that simply means that "being in love," is roughly identical to the motivation to achieve/acquire reward. (Addiction/motivation.)
When Robert Palmer sang, "Might as well face it, you're addicted to love..." ...was he right?
