Science
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HAN NAH WAL KER
Friday 14th February 2014
The Psychology of Love Can science help unravel the mysteries of love? Sarah Glew Science Correspondent The Psychology of Love. ‘Oh no!’ I hear you cry. Half of you will be too lovedup to think that such soppy common sense rubbish is even worth a read. Oh, and also that psychology isn’t a science anyway. And the other half, well you’ll be dreading Valentine’s Day and all it stands for and wishing everyone would just stop analysing exactly why you remain single. But read on. Love, it seems, is all based on hormones. Oxytocin, a hormone released
TOP 4 “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love” Carl Sagan “The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.” Charles Darwin “Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.” Albert Einstein “Ignore your son’s attempts to teach you physics. Physics is not the most important thing, love is.” Richard Feynman
by the hypothalamus, nicknamed the ‘love hormone’, has been catapulted into the pharmaceutical world as the ‘love drug’. The hormone is at least partly responsible for romantic bonding, maternal instinct and even orgasm. It leads to feeling physically relaxed around those we trust, and physically excited by the touch of those we lust after. It’s the hormone that makes holding her newborn baby the most amazing moment of a mother’s life, and the hormone that makes the baby’s mother look the most beautiful she ever will. There is now plenty of evidence that huge proportions of what we label ‘love’ are caused, physiologically, by the release of oxytocin. Naturally, it has the potential to be a
SCIENTISTS ON LOVE
huge money maker and oxytocin nasal spray has been suggested as a treatment for shyness, anxiety, and the social deficits of autism. However, this love drug has a darker side. In one experiment it was indicated that providing participants with a dose of oxytocin didn’t increase their
“OXYTOCIN NASAL SPRAY HAS BEEN SUGGESTED AS A TREATMENT FOR SHYNESS, ANXIETY, AND AUTISM” love for the world or humanity in general. Instead, it increased the love and trust they felt towards their in-group. It was shown to lead to ethnocentrism, and favouring their ‘in-group’ in a task involving money distribution. Could this be why people in love seem only to have eyes for each other? Why people can end up neglecting those around them, their hobbies, their work, even sometimes common sense, all in the flushes of new love? So as we become adults, doomed to a love that’s simply chemical, that makes us foolish and blind to others, is there any psychology that can give us a little hope? Yes. The biggest factor in how we love, and are loved, is through rearing children. Attachment theory says that, once you’ve had that lovely oxytocin glow of holding your newborn for the first time, you begin forming attachments with your child. The sensitivity of a baby’s primary caregivers can be directly mapped onto the type of attachment the baby will form in adult life.
Mary Ainsworth’s 1978 Strange Situation study demonstrated that children can be categorised according to the four types of parental care they received: secure, anxious-avoidant, anxious-ambivalent and disorganised. It is a fascinating area of study, because these patterns don’t only affect the cognitive ability and emotional stability of children; they affect their style of loving too. Research has found that adults with anxious-avoidant attachment patterns tend to idealise their partner but avoid emotional
or sexual intimacy. On the other side, those who were anxious-ambivalent as children tend to avoid companionate love, act obsessively, neurotically and depend too much on their partner. So, it appears that love isn’t as sparkly and rosy as the card companies like to make out. Or if it is, it is not any more so today than on any other day. Thanks to the ‘love hormone’, however, the flushes of love feel pretty great. So whether you’re in love, or just think you are, or know you’re not, perhaps it is just best to put these worries aside and have a happy February 14th.
The Curies certainly deserve a nomination for any ‘smartest family of all time’ award. Sharing a Nobel prize themselves for ‘joint researches on the radiation phenomena’ was not enough and the pair produced a daughter, Irène, who went on to share another Nobel prize with her cousin Frédéric. Some serious gene-ius being inherited it would seem.
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