L'Love Is the feeling we have for our spouse, our children or our dog the same? It depends… Several studies have already attempted to image the brain activity of the brain when we think of the person we love, showing that love activates and deactivates several areas of the brain, creating a fairly precise neural signature.
A new study, conducted at Aalto University in Finland, sought to compare this signature of brain activity between different types of love, including romantic love, parental love, friendly love, love for neighbors, love for nature and love for animals.
The results, published on August 26, 2024 in the journal Cerebral Cortex, highlight that all emotional relationships between people, including with strangers, activate and deactivate the same areas of the brain, at different intensities. On the other hand, love for nature and for animals has a different signature… except in people who have pets.
How love is read in the brain
The researchers observed the brain activity of 55 adults (including 29 women) aged 28 to 53. All participants had in common that they were in a relationship and had at least one child. Their brain activity was measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they listened to sentences describing banal situations, but which were supposed to arouse their affection for their loved ones. For example, one of the sentences was: “Your child runs towards you laughing in a sunny meadow. You smile together and the sunbeams make his face shine. You feel love for your child.”
Other sentences were supposed to evoke feelings of affection for friends, neighbors, nature, and pets. And others were completely neutral, describing a situation that had nothing to do with any of these forms of love, in order to identify the brain activity due to listening to and understanding a sentence and to elucidate the activity specific to feelings of love. After listening to the sentence, participants were asked to try to think about it again, focusing on the emotion they were feeling, in order to observe more precisely the brain activity actually specific to the emotion.
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Compared to neutral sentences, those about love activated more brain regions and turned off others. The strongest differences were in areas linked to the reward system (notably the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortex as well as the cingulate gyrus). This activity had the same signature during the listening phase and the one that followed (when the participants had to think about it), showing that it is indeed induced by the emotion felt.
Pet owners can be identified by looking at their brains
All types of love for other people aroused the same areas of the brain. But parental love did so with greater intensity than all the others, activating more of the striatum, below the cortex (linked to motivation) and its neighbor, the thalamus (linked to awareness and alertness).
Not surprisingly, the least intense love was for neighbors, nature, and animals. Moreover, the latter two did not activate the same areas as love for people. Except for participants who had pets (about half of the participants)! In them, some of the characteristic areas of love for people were also activated, such as the cingulate gyrus. Thus, it is possible to distinguish people who have pets from those who do not just by looking at their brain activity.
Brain areas activated by different types of love (romantic, parental, friendly, towards a stranger, an animal, nature). Credits: Parttyli Rinne et al 2024, Aalto University.
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These results would therefore confirm that humans can create attachment relationships for their animals similar to those they might have with other people. However, the authors warn that their results are not necessarily universally applicable, because love is not only biological, but also has an important cultural component. These neural signatures could therefore be different in other regions of the world (the study was carried out in Finland), particularly love for animals.
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