Articles on brain activity, fear, love

Aron, A., Fisher, H., Mashek, D.J., Strong, G., & Brown, L.L. (2005). Reward, motivation, and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love. J. Neurophys. 94(1): 327-37.

Early-stage romantic love can induce euphoria, is a cross-cultural phenomenon, and is possibly a developed form of a mammalian drive to pursue preferred mates. It has an important influence on social behaviors that have reproductive and genetic consequences. To determine which reward and motivation systems may be involved, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging and studied 10 women and 7 men who were intensely “in love” from 1 to 17 mo. Participants alternately viewed a photograph of their beloved and a photograph of a familiar individual, interspersed with a distraction-attention task. Group activation specific to the beloved under the two control conditions occurred in dopamine-rich areas associated with mammalian reward and motivation, namely the right ventral tegmental area and the right postero-dorsal body and medial caudate nucleus. Activation in the left ventral tegmental area was correlated with facial attractiveness scores. Activation in the right anteromedial caudate was correlated with questionnaire scores that quantified intensity of romantic passion. In the left insula-putamen-globus pallidus, activation correlated with trait affect intensity. The results suggest that romantic love uses subcortical reward and motivation systems to focus on a specific individual, that limbic cortical regions process individual emotion factors, and that there is localization heterogeneity for reward functions in the human brain.

 

How similar are the experiences of social rejection and

physicalpain? Extant research suggests that a network of brain regions thatsupport the affective but not the sensory components of physical pain underlie both experiences. Here we demonstrate that when rejection is powerfully elicited experienced an unwanted break-up view a photograph of their ex-partner as they think about being rejected the sensory components of physical pain (secondary somatosensory cortex; dorsal posterior insula) become active. We demonstratethe overlap between social rejection and physical pain intheseareas by comparing both conditions in the same individualsusing functional MRI. We further demonstrate the specithe secondary somatosensory cortex and dorsal posterior insulaactivity to physical pain by comparing activated locations in ourstudy with a database of over 500 published studies. Activationin these regions was highly diagnostic of physical pain, withpositive predictive values up to 88%. These results give new meaningto the idea that rejection and physical pain are similar not only in that they are bothdistressingas well.—by having people who recently—areas that supportficity of“hurts.” They demonstrate that rejection—they share a common somatosensory representation