Imaging Data Uncover Mysteries of Love

People live for love, die for love, and kill for love. In a recent study of 114 men and women who had recently been rejected in love, 40 percent were clinically depressed, and an estimated 50 percent to 70 percent of American women who are victims of murder die at the hands of a spouse or lover.

At APA’s 2004 annual meeting, anthropologist Helen Fisher, Ph.D., will present new functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data on the brain in love and show how this brain system affects worldwide patterns of marriage and divorce and crimes of passion. Her presentation will take place on Wednesday, May 5, at 2 p.m. in room 1E07 of the Javits Center.

Fisher is a research professor at Rutgers University and author of four books on the evolution of human sexuality, romantic love, attachment, and gender differences in the brain and behavior. She is the author of the new book Why We Love: The Nature and Evolution of Romantic Love (Holt).

Fisher proposes that romantic love is a developed form of mammalian mating drive (not an emotion) designed to motivate men and women to focus their courtship energy on preferred reproductive partners, thereby conserving mating time and energy.

She and colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and SUNY Stony Brook put 17 people who had “just fallen madly in love” into an fMRI scanner to identify the brain circuitry of this universal phenomenon. Participants alternately viewed a photo of a beloved and a photo of a familiar, emotionally neutral individual, interspersed with a distraction task. Dopamine pathways associated with reward and motivation were activated, regions of activation changed as the relationship endured, and men and women showed some different brain responses.

Fisher maintains that romantic love is largely distinct from the sex drive; that it evolved to facilitate mate choice; that gender differences in romantic passion reflect varied ancestral male and female reproductive strategies; that changes in romantic attraction across time are adaptations for childrearing; that this brain system is closely integrated with brain networks for hate/rage; that “frustration attraction,” “abandonment rage,” and “rejection depression” are Darwinian adaptive mechanisms; and that romantic love can become a life-threatening addiction. ▪

Philip Muskin, M.D., is a member of APA’s Scientific Program Committee.