The Psychological Effect of Love

“What t’is to love?” Shakespeare once asked. Our ancestors have been attempting to answer this question since they sat around their campfires or lay and watched the stars a million years ago. Never have anthropologists found a society that did not have love in it. Around the world, people love; they sing for love, they dance for love, they compose poems and stories about love, they live for love, they kill for love, and they die for love. I think it’s safe to say, romantic love is one of the most powerful sensations of Earth, and psychologists have been trying to understand it for years. In order to understand this incredibly powerful sensation, let’s take a road down different psychological research attempting to understand the inner workings of love across time.

Love can reduce pain perception; in a study conducted by Tamam and Ahmad (2017), participants' pain response to thermal heat was measured while they were either exposed to a picture of their romantic love or a familiar acquaintance. The study found that being exposed to a picture of one’s romantic love diminishes, masks or numbs both physical and emotional pain perception. This powerful emotion of love activates areas of the prefrontal cortex which feel comfort, safety and intimacy. When these areas of the brain activate, pain is numbed almost like a Panadol.

Not only is love a highly effective pain killer, it also kicks into the bloodstream at an incredibly fast rate. Aron et al (1997) discovered a shocking revelation about love; the human brain only needs about an hour to fall in love, and in rare cases it only needs five minutes. Although lasting love requires time to grow and mature, the initial spark can ignite almost instantly.

Once the spark has ignited, it can be addicting. Zou et al (2016) found numerous similarities between early romantic love and substance abuse. A brain falling in love experiences a blinding euphoria stemming from ?

a cocktail of neurochemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin as well as adrenaline. Highly addictive drugs such as cocaine trigger the exact same cocktail mix of neurotransmitters in the brain and activate the exact same regions of the brain that are associated with love. Love has all the characteristics an addiction requires; you focus on the person, you obsessively think about them, you crave them, you distort reality and are willing to take enormous risks to win this person.

However, love goes way beyond a mere cocaine high. Although there exist many similarities between love and drug usage, drugs display dysfunction in cognition while love enhances cognition. In fact, Forster et al (2009) found that love actually changes the way an individual thinks. When in love, people shift more towards a long-term thinking pattern, enhancing holistic thinking and thereby opening their mind and stimulating their creative thought patterns. This new way of creative thinking shapes the way they analyze and process both emotions and experiences. Art forms such as poetry and painting become ideal mediums to express these new and complicated feelings.

The benefits of love are not just limited to creativity enhancement. Love has also been found to be a major stress reliever; after a long day, one act of love can transform your mood. Study after study has shown that small interactions with a loved one can significantly reduce your stress. Something as simple as holding your partner’s hand can unravel a week’s worth of tension. The power of physical touch gets stronger the longer you and your loved one are together. That person becomes a beacon of safety and comfort in your life. That’s why a mere hug can melt away all of your stress. In fact, a study by the University of Arizona found that simply thinking about your loved one reduces stress.

Psychological research into love has given us a clear understanding of how powerful love can be if harnessed correctly. The more love an individual has in their life, the better off they’re bound to be mentally, physically, emotionally and cognitively. In his letter to his daughter about the universal force of love, Einstein wrote:

“There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us.

This universal force is love. “

Kalpana Dawani - 12B