Reward, Motivation, and Emotion Systems Associated With Early-Stage Intense Romantic Love

Aron, Arthur ; Fisher, Helen ; Mashek, Debra J. ; Strong, Greg ; Li, Haifang ; Brown, Lucy L. (2005) — Journal of Neurophysiology

DOI: 10.1152/jn.00838.2004

Synopsis

Early-stage romantic love is described as capable of producing euphoria and as a cross-cultural phenomenon that may reflect an evolved mammalian drive to pursue preferred mates. It influences social behaviors in ways that can have reproductive and genetic consequences. To identify the reward and motivation systems that may be involved, the study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain activity while participants were intensely in love for a period ranging from 1 to 17 months. The objective was to determine how neural circuits associated with reward and motivation respond when individuals view the beloved compared with a familiar person, under conditions designed to control for distraction and attention. The sample consisted of 17 adults, including 10 women and 7 men, all reporting strong romantic attachment. During the scanning sessions, participants alternately viewed a photograph of their beloved and a photograph of a familiar individual, interspersed with a distraction-attention task. Brain activity that was specific to the beloved, after accounting for the control conditions, showed engagement of dopamine-rich regions tied to mammalian reward and motivation, particularly the right ventral tegmental area and the right postero-dorsal body and medial caudate nucleus. In addition, the study found that activation in the left ventral tegmental area correlated with ratings of the beloved’s facial attractiveness. Activation in the right anteromedial caudate correlated with questionnaire-derived measures of the intensity of romantic passion, while activation in the left insula-putamen-globus pallidus cohort correlated with trait-level affect intensity. Taken together, the results indicate that romantic love may recruit subcortical reward and motivation systems to focus attention on a single individual, while limbic cortical regions may process factors related to the quality of the emotion itself. The findings also suggest that there is localization heterogeneity for reward-related functions in the human brain, reflecting a nuanced organization of how reward and motivation processes map onto distinct neural substrates during intense romantic attachment. This pattern supports a model in which early-stage love engages both shared reward circuitry and region-specific emotion-processing networks to maintain focus on a chosen partner.

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