LOVE (SCIENTIFICALLY): MEANING AND CONCEPT - NEUROPSYCHOLOGY - 2025

The love, scientifically, is an impulse of mammals, such as hunger or thirst. The experience of love is divided into three stages: lust, attraction and attachment. Lust is the feeling of sexual desire; romantic attraction determines which partners are attractive, saving time and energy choosing; Attachment implies sharing a home, parental duties, mutual defense, and in human beings it implies feelings of security.

Love is a universal concept, it exists in all cultures. Although there are some differences in the definition of love depending on the culture and the given context, there are a number of characteristics. In all cultures love is recognized as a specific pattern of feelings and behaviors.

Many people have thought of love, and some continue to think of it, as something mystical and magical that is why I will try to explain in this article what love really is, what sense does it make, why we fall in love and how we fall in love among other issues.

Love: concept

Love is a psychological and physiological state with a pattern of feelings characterized by the need to be with the loved one and that said person feels the same towards us.

These feelings are represented through a series of behaviors that demonstrate intimacy between people such as physical contact, altruistic behaviors or sexual relations in romantic love.

Being such an abstract term it is difficult to look for common characteristics that differentiate it from other concepts such as friendship or veneration. For this reason, feelings are often confused, but this is normal because the brain does not work in terms of all or nothing, but gradually.

For example, not all the people we meet are our friends, and we do not feel with the same intensity the friendship of all our friends.

What does seem clear is that love is the opposite of hatred, which is described as a feeling of rejection towards a person or thing. So if love is the opposite, it would be defined as a feeling of attraction towards another person or thing.

Definitions of love according to the RAE

Love has many meanings in the dictionary of the RAE (Royal Academy of the Spanish language). In the following image you can find them:

Types of love

There are several types of love depending on the object or person to which it is directed. The most general categorization would divide them into two groups, impersonal love and interpersonal love.

Impersonal love

This group includes all the feelings of love that are not directed at people. The recipient can be almost anything, an object, an act, a profession, a concept…

For example, you can love a teddy bear for the memories it brings back; someone may love to ski or swim; you can love psychology or science (here I speak from experience); or you can love nature.

In all cases the person feels the need to be in contact with what they love.

Interpersonal love

When we talk about love we usually refer to this type of love. This group includes all the feelings of love that are directed to other people, who are generally a family member, friend or partner.

Although these are the most common uses when talking about love, do not forget that there is also self-love, or love of oneself, which is no less important than the rest. In fact, I'd say it's even more important.

Love and the choice of partner

In this section I will explain the process of falling in love and try to answer some very common questions such as what do we look at the other person?

The first crushes usually occur in adolescence, although it is an immature love and usually the right person is not chosen. This infatuation and search for a partner is done to supply four basic human needs.

First of all, to have sexual intercourse and / or reproduce (hormones call us); second, to have and give company; third, to have an attachment relationship with the other person; and fourth and last, to give and receive help and care.

The basics of finding love

In order to select the partner, a series of circumstances must be present without which it is unlikely to be found:

-The person must be accessed, that is, the person must be from our circle of friends or from another environment such as work and school, although nowadays with social networks and partner search pages you can have access the person wherever they are.

- Don't be repulsed. It seems obvious, but with this I mean that it is not necessary that the person seems attractive to you from the beginning, in fact, I know established couples who when they met did not believe that the other person was attractive. If it is necessary that you do not find it unpleasant, at this point it has been shown that the smell is especially important as I will develop later.

-That some tastes and expectations for the future are shared. In reality, when the couple is already established, people tend to mimic and imitate their partner, which is why many more tastes and expectations are shared, but it is necessary that at the beginning of the relationship there is something that unites you.

What attracts men and women?

Once we meet a person in the right circumstances, what do we base on when choosing our partner? There have been numerous studies throughout history and some clear preferences have been found that we humans present when choosing our partner.

Physical appearance and morphology

These preferences are basically morphological, in general women look at the height and muscle mass index of men, while these are fixed in the ratio between the waist and the hip. Symmetry and body odor of the person are very important for both sexes.

These preferences have a clear evolutionary sense, we choose the partner with whom it is most likely to reproduce and keep our young, large and strong men and women with wide hips.

Although the case of the preference of women is curious, because in a study carried out in 2005 it was shown that the preference of women in terms of men's height depended on the phase of the menstrual cycle in which they were. Women tended to prefer taller men when they were in the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle (follicular phase).

Symmetry and body odor

Preferences according to symmetry and body odor may not have such an obvious evolutionary sense, but it seems that the most symmetrical people are considered more attractive because symmetry is an indicator that our genes are fine, there are no genetic errors, and that we are fertile.

As for body odor, some studies have shown that this is an important factor when choosing a partner, because it tells us if we are genetically compatible with the other person, it can even tell us if they are fertile or if they suffer from any disease.

In a study by Havlicek and her team it was found that women who were in a fertile phase of their menstrual cycle preferred the body odor of more dominant men.

This makes evolutionary sense, since the pair (or pairs) of the dominant male of a group of animals is also usually treated with privileges, for example, receiving more food and will be more protected.

The brain chemistry of love

It is clear that when we are in love our world changes, especially if that love is reciprocated. It seems that there is only that special person, we attend to things that previously seemed superfluous and meaningless, such as the sunset, and we stop lending to other things or people that previously seemed important to us.

The most graphic way to describe it is to compare it to an addiction, it may seem ugly or exaggerated, but, in fact, the changes that occur in the brain when we are addicted to something and when we fall in love are very similar.

Limbic system

The pleasant feeling of euphoria that we feel when we are with our partner or when they do something we like, occurs as a consequence of the activation of the limbic system, or reinforcement system, produced by the increase in dopamine. This feeling reinforces us and makes us want to be with our partner more and more.

This does not happen only with love, it happens with any reinforcing stimulus, that is, with anything that we like, and it is one of the bases of learning. It can happen to us drinking chocolate, playing something or drawing.

It also occurs when we take a drug since it is precisely one of the most important mechanisms in the regulation of addictions.

Oxytocin and vasopressin

Other substances closely related to love and sex are oxytocin and vasopressin. These hormones are secreted while the couple is having a sexual relationship, both in men and women, they cause euphoria and analgesia, so that we are not bothered by any damage that may occur during sexual intercourse.

It has been found that during the first phases of the relationship the concentration of these substances increases markedly. In addition, oxytocin, also called the love hormone, not only acts in romantic love, it is also related to maternal love, since women secrete it during childbirth and when they feed their baby through breastfeeding.

Serotonin

The obsession we feel for our partner, the feeling of wanting to be with her all the time and do everything with her, could be determined by a general drop in serotonin levels in the brain.

In patients with obsessive disorders, a decrease in serotonin levels similar to that which occurs to the couple when they are at the beginning of their relationship has been found.

The passion and unconditional love shown early in the relationship is related to the inhibition of the frontal cortex and the amygdala.

Amygdala

The amygdala plays an essential role in the recognition of aversive stimuli, in the case of the couple it would serve to detect behaviors of that person that we do not like, and the frontal cortex functions as a filter that serves to control our impulses. This would explain why we have a less severe judgment of the person we love.

References

1. de Boer, A., van Buel, E., & Ter Horst, G. (2012). Love is more than just a kiss: a neurobiological perspective on love and affection. Neuroscience, 114–124. doi: 10.1016 / j.neuroscience.2011.11.017
2. Fisher, H., Aron, A., & Brown, LL (2005). Romantic Love: An fMRI Study of a Neural Mechanism for Mate Choice. The Journal of Comparative Neurology, 58-62.
3. Maister, L., & Tsakiris, M. (2016). Intimate imitation: Automatic motor imitation in romantic relationships. Cognition, 108-113. doi: 10.1016 / j.cognition.2016.03.018
4. RAE. (sf). Love. Retrieved on April 5, 2016, from Dictionary of the Spanish Language: dle.rae.es
5. Xu, X., Weng, X., & Aron, A. (2015). The Mesolimbic Dopamine Pathway and Romantic Love. In AW Toga, Brain Mapping. An Encyclopedic Reference (pp. 631–633). London: Academic Press.