ISU researchers look at how love impacts your brain and body

Love can be tricky to describe or explain. You can ask just about anyone and get a slightly different answer. However, Mona Xu, a professor at Idaho State university, along with doctoral student Ariana Tart-Zelvin recently published a paper on what happens to your brain when you fall in love.

Xu and other researchers have used neuroimaging equipment as part of their research.

“The activations [in the brain] look very similar to drug addiction, you get activations in areas that are associated with reward and motivation and learning,” commented Xu.

Xu said they can use the neuroimaging equipment to see how the brain responds when looking at pictures of someone they love. They have also used the technology to see if people experience love differently, depending on where you live.

“So what neuroimaging allowed us to do is look at the brain when they are in the early stage of the intense romantic love period. I did the first test in China and we compared it to some of the results we have seen in the United States. And they are nearly identical,” said Xu.

Finally, Xu said how we experience love for our partner can change over time. This technology allows researchers to see what activates in the brain and what changes. However, Xu said other researchers have discovered some peoples still feel the same way about their partner as they did when they first started dating.

“Scanned people who had been together for 20, 30 years and still claimed to feel the same way, you still see that activation in these people, so it is possible,” said Xu. “But it does tend to taper off a bit, but then other areas become more active, more attachment based areas, more calm serotonin rich based areas become active [in the brain].”