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Essay 4 is a research-based MLA-formatted essay on how Love Affects The Brain

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Specifically in chapter 5 of, The Brain: The Story of You, author David Eagleman brings us to understand that neurons in the human brain require constant contact and needs from other humans. It's comparable to that of a necessity

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Read 1,725 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Locked in the silence and darkness of your skull, your brain fashions the rich narrative...

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New York Times source (also a formal source)

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New York Times source (also a formal source)

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It is noted that all relationships change the brain, but romantic love changes the brain to a much deeper level. With recent research they documented solid evidence that individuals in love, experience a higher pain tolerance and individuals healthily in love also show evidence for less stress and overall health longetivity.

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A RELATIVELY new field, called interpersonal neurobiology, draws its vigor from one of the great discoveries of our era: that the brain is constantly rewiring itself based on daily life. In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of your life literally transforms you.

All relationships change the brain -- but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.

Every great love affair begins with a scream. At birth, the brain starts blazing new neural pathways based on its odyssey in an alien world. An infant is steeped in bright, buzzing, bristling sensations, raw emotions and the curious feelings they unleash, weird objects, a flux of faces, shadowy images and dreams -- but most of all a powerfully magnetic primary caregiver whose wizardry astounds.

Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can't show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn't matter whose body is whose. Wordlessly, relying on the heart's semaphores, the mother says all an infant needs to hear, communicating through eyes, face and voice. Thanks to advances in neuroimaging, we now have evidence that a baby's first attachments imprint its brain. The patterns of a lifetime's behaviors, thoughts, self-regard and choice of sweethearts all begin in this crucible.

We used to think this was the end of the story: first heredity, then the brain's engraving mental maps in childhood, after which you're pretty much stuck with the final blueprint.

But as a wealth of imaging studies highlight, the neural alchemy continues throughout life as we mature and forge friendships, dabble in affairs, succumb to romantic love, choose a soul mate. The body remembers how that oneness with Mother felt, and longs for its adult equivalent.

As the most social apes, we inhabit a mirror-world in which every important relationship, whether with spouse, friend or child, shapes the brain, which in turn shapes our relationships. Daniel J. Siegel and Allan N. Schore, colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently discussed groundbreaking work in the field at a conference on the school's campus. It's not that caregiving changes genes; it influences how the genes express themselves as the child grows. Dr. Siegel, a neuropsychiatrist, refers to the indelible sense of ''feeling felt'' that we learn as infants and seek in romantic love, a reciprocity that remodels the brain's architecture and functions.

Does it also promote physical well-being? ''Scientific studies of longevity, medical and mental health, happiness and even wisdom,'' Dr. Siegel says, ''point to supportive relationships as the most robust predictor of these positive attributes in our lives across the life span.''

The supportive part is crucial. Loving relationships alter the brain the most significantly.

Just consider how much learning happens when you choose a mate. Along with thrilling dependency comes glimpsing the world through another's eyes; forsaking some habits and adopting others (good or bad); tasting new ideas, rituals, foods or landscapes; a slew of added friends and family; a tapestry of physical intimacy and affection; and many other catalysts, including a tornadic blast of attraction and attachment hormones -- all of which revamp the brain.

When two people become a couple, the brain extends its idea of self to include the other; instead of the slender pronoun ''I,'' a plural self emerges who can borrow some of the other's assets and strengths. The brain knows who we are. The immune system knows who we're not, and it stores pieces of invaders as memory aids. Through lovemaking, or when we pass along a flu or a cold sore, we trade bits of identity with loved ones, and in time we become a sort of chimera. We don't just get under a mate's skin, we absorb him or her.

Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful. As imaging studies by the U.C.L.A. neuroscientist Naomi Eisenberger show, the same areas of the brain that register physical pain are active when someone feels socially rejected. That's why being spurned by a lover hurts all over the body, but in no place you can point to. Or rather, you'd need to point to the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in the brain, the front of a collar wrapped around the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers zinging messages between the hemispheres that register both rejection and physical assault.

Whether they speak Armenian or Mandarin, people around the world use the same images of physical pain to describe a broken heart, which they perceive as crushing and crippling. It's not just a metaphor for an emotional punch. Social pain can trigger the same sort of distress as a stomachache or a broken bone.

But a loving touch is enough to change everything. James Coan, a neuroscientist at the University of Virginia, conducted experiments in 2006 in which he gave an electric shock to the ankles of women in happy, committed relationships. Tests registered their anxiety before, and pain level during, the shocks.

Then they were shocked again, this time holding their loving partner's hand. The same level of electricity produced a significantly lower neural response throughout the brain. In troubled relationships, this protective effect didn't occur. If you're in a healthy relationship, holding your partner's hand is enough to subdue your blood pressure, ease your response to stress, improve your health and soften physical pain. We alter one another's physiology and neural functions.

However, it's not all sub rosa. One can decide to be a more attentive and compassionate partner, mindful of the other's motives, hurts and longings. Breaking old habits isn't easy, since habits are deeply ingrained neural shortcuts, a way of slurring over details without having to dwell on them. Couples often choose to rewire their brains on purpose, sometimes with a therapist's help, to ease conflicts and strengthen their at-one-ness.

While they were both in the psychology department of Stony Brook University, Bianca Acevedo and Arthur Aron scanned the brains of long-married couples who described themselves as still ''madly in love.'' Staring at a picture of a spouse lit up their reward centers as expected; the same happened with those newly in love (and also with cocaine users). But, in contrast to new sweethearts and cocaine addicts, long-married couples displayed calm in sites associated with fear and anxiety. Also, in the opiate-rich sites linked to pleasure and pain relief, and those affiliated with maternal love, the home fires glowed brightly.

A happy marriage relieves stress and makes one feel as safe as an adored baby. Small wonder ''Baby'' is a favorite adult endearment. Not that romantic love is an exact copy of the infant bond. One needn't consciously regard a lover as momlike to profit from the parallels. The body remembers, the brain recycles and restages.

So how does this play out beyond the lab? I saw the healing process up close after my 74-year-old husband, who is also a writer, suffered a left-hemisphere stroke that wiped out a lifetime of language. All he could utter was ''mem.'' Mourning the loss of our duet of decades, I began exploring new ways to communicate, through caring gestures, pantomime, facial expressions, humor, play, empathy and tons of affection -- the brain's epitome of a safe attachment. That, plus the admittedly eccentric home schooling I provided, and his diligent practice, helped rewire his brain to a startling degree, and in time we were able to talk again, he returned to writing books, and even his vision improved. The brain changes with experience throughout our lives; it's in loving relationships of all sorts -- partners, children, close friends -- that brain and body really thrive.

During idylls of safety, when your brain knows you're with someone you can trust, it needn't waste precious resources coping with stressors or menace. Instead it may spend its lifeblood learning new things or fine-tuning the process of healing. Its doors of perception swing wide open. The flip side is that, given how vulnerable one then is, love lessons -- sweet or villainous -- can make a deep impression. Wedded hearts change everything, even the brain.

DRAWING (DRAWING BY OLIMPIA ZAGNOLI)

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A RELATIVELY new field, called interpersonal neurobiology, draws its vigor from one of the great discoveries of our era: that the brain is constantly rewiring itself based on daily life. In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of your life literally transforms you.

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Neil Gaiman writes a beautiful and powerful excerpt of how love feels to an individual. This excerpt covers the feelings of being in love to what the reader assumes is a break up breaking the individuals heart. This excerpt masterfully pieces the raw emotions out for the readers to understand whether they have been in love or not.

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Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can ...

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What exactly does love do to the brain? This author presents a factual analysis research and details into experiments and talking about how our brain perceives love and codependent to love - how our brain perceives and changes with attraction.

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How Does the Brain Impact our Feelings of Love and Heartbreak?

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Helen Fisher went on a TED Talk to speak about why humans crave love and need it so much to the point of where it is a necessity. She and her team put individuals who were dumped while in love and currently in love through MRI brain scans to answer why humans crave love and how our brains changes when we are in love.

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Richard Schwartz and Jacqueline Olds spoke about how love evolves and in turn meshes/adapts the brain based on love over time. They note that love also deactivates neural pathways linked to certain brain functions.

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They have also been happily married for nearly four decades.

Love may well be one of the most studied, but least understood, behaviors. More than 20 years ago, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher studied 166 societies and found evidence of romantic love-the kind that leaves one breathless and euphoric-in 147 of them. This ubiquity, said Schwartz, an HMS associate professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., indicates that "there's good reason to suspect that romantic love is kept alive by something basic to our biological nature."

Rewarding ourselves with love

In 2005, Fisher led a research team that published a groundbreaking study that included the first functional MRI (fMRI) images of the brains of individuals in the throes of romantic love. Her team analyzed 2,500 brain scans of college students who viewed pictures of someone special to them and compared the scans to ones taken when the students looked at pictures of acquaintances. Photos of people they romantically loved caused the participants' brains to become active in regions rich with dopamine, the so-called feel-good neurotransmitter. Two of the brain regions that showed activity in the fMRI scans were the caudate nucleus, a region associated with reward detection and expectation and the integration of sensory experiences into social behavior, and the ventral tegmental area, which is associated with pleasure, focused attention, and the motivation to pursue and acquire rewards.

The ventral tegmental area is part of what is known as the brain's reward circuit, which, coincidentally, was discovered by Olds's father, James, when she was 7 years old. This circuit is considered to be a primitive neural network, meaning it is evolutionarily old; it links with the nucleus accumbens. Some of the other structures that contribute to the reward circuit-the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex-are exceptionally sensitive to (and reinforcing of) behavior that induces pleasure, such as sex, food consumption, and drug use.

"We know that primitive areas of the brain are involved in romantic love," said Olds, an HMS associate professor of psychiatry at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital, "and that these areas light up on brain scans when talking about a loved one. These areas can stay lit up for a long time for some couples."

When we are falling in love, chemicals associated with the reward circuit flood our brain, producing a variety of physical and emotional responses-racing hearts, sweaty palms, flushed cheeks, feelings of passion and anxiety. Levels of the stress hormone cortisol increase during the initial phase of romantic love, marshaling our bodies to cope with the "crisis" at hand. As cortisol levels rise, levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin become depleted. Low levels of serotonin precipitate what Schwartz described as the "intrusive, maddeningly preoccupying thoughts, hopes, terrors of early love"-the obsessive-compulsive behaviors associated with infatuation.

Being love-struck also releases high levels of dopamine, a chemical that "gets the reward system going," said Olds. Dopamine activates the reward circuit, helping to make love a pleasurable experience similar to the euphoria associated with use of cocaine or alcohol. Scientific evidence for this similarity can be found in many studies, including one conducted at the University of California, San Francisco, and published in 2012 in Science. That study reported that male fruit flies that were sexually rejected drank four times as much alcohol as fruit flies that mated with female fruit flies. "Same reward center," said Schwartz, "different way to get there."

Other chemicals at work during romantic love are oxytocin and vasopressin, hormones that have roles in pregnancy, nursing, and mother-infant attachment. Released during sex and heightened by skin-to-skin contact, oxytocin deepens feelings of attachment and makes couples feel closer to one another after having sex. Oxytocin, known also as the love hormone, provokes feelings of contentment, calmness, and security, which are often associated with mate bonding. Vasopressin is linked to behavior that produces long-term, monogamous relationships. The differences in behavior associated with the actions of the two hormones may explain why passionate love fades as attachment grows.

In addition to the positive feelings romance brings, love also deactivates the neural pathway responsible for negative emotions, such as fear and social judgment. These positive and negative feelings involve two neurological pathways. The one linked with positive emotions connects the prefrontal cortex to the nucleus accumbens, while the other, which is linked with negative emotions, connects the nucleus accumbens to the amygdala. When we are engaged in romantic love, the neural machinery responsible for making critical assessments of other people, including assessments of those with whom we are romantically involved, shuts down. "That's the neural basis for the ancient wisdom 'love is blind'," said Schwartz.

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They have also been happily married for nearly four decades. Love may well be one of the most studied, but least understood, behaviors. More than 20 years ago, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher studied 166 societies and found evidence of romantic love-the kind that leaves one breathless and euphoric-in 147 of them.

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Love has a multitude of "hardwired" effects on the brain. It is shown to actively rewire our brains framefork from the first time we fall in love to the last. Love targets several sectors in the brain that are directly related to releasing certain chemicals. Furthermore, with the release of these chemicals certain brain pathways have disconnects causing possible smothering of other minor brain functions.

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Abstract
Romantic love has been the source for some of the greatest achievements of mankind throughout the ages. The recent localization of romantic love within subcortico-cortical reward, motivation and emotion systems in the human brain has suggested that love is a goal-directed drive with predictable facilitation effects on cognitive behavior, rather than a pure emotion. Here we show that the subliminal exposure of a beloved's name (romantic prime) during a lexical decision task dramatically improves performance in women in love (Experiment 1), as the subliminal presentation of a passion's descriptive noun does (Experiment 2). The parallel between love and passion allows us to interpret these facilitation effects as corresponding to cognitive top-down processes within a motivation-enhanced neural network.

Acknowledgments

This research is supported by the Committee for Protection of Human Subjects, the Swiss National Foundation, and the Swiss National Foundation for research in Biology and Medicine, grant #1223/PASMA 111563/1.

The authors thank Professor Todd Heatherton and Professor George Wolford for their helpful comments on the manuscript

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Abstract Romantic love has been the source for some of the greatest achievements of mankind throughout the ages. The recent localization of romantic love within subcortico-cortical reward, motivation and emotion systems in the human brain has suggested that love is a goal-directed drive with predictable facilitation effects on cognitive behavior, rather than a pure emotion.

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Peer-reviewed Formal Source from DVC library database search

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Peer-reviewed Formal Source from DVC library database search

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Scientists review and run tests to differentiate the specific sides of the brain that get affected(Left Hemisphere and Right Hemisphere centric)  when a human brain experiences love. The main conclusion that they found, was that when it came to romantic love the brain experienced higher activations in the right brain primarily linked to genuine altruism, as well as true empathy, rapport, intuition, and charisma.

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By: Ross Buck
Department of Communication Sciences, University of Connecticut;

Acknowledgement: I gratefully acknowledge the contributions of collaborations with Benson Ginsburg and Elliott D. Ross and suggestions from Albert Galaburda, Jaak Panksepp, and Don Tucker.

Jeremy R. Gray (2002) has reviewed my developmental-interactionist theory of affect ( Buck, 1999) and has raised interesting and important questions and concerns. Gray questioned the conceptual basis and empirical support for the notion of prosocial biological affects, and he was skeptical whether the distinction between individualist or, colloquially,"selfish" affects and prosocial or"cooperative" affects can contribute to the discussion regarding hemispheric differences. The distinction between prosocial and selfish affects is based on Paul D. MacLean's (1990, 1993) theory, which distinguished emotions concerned with self-preservation, such as aggression and fear, and emotions concerned with the preservation of the species, such as sex and sociability. MacLean argued that the former involves amygdala circuits, and the latter, septal and thalamo-cingulate circuits. The prosocial-selfish distinction is fundamental to my approach, which identifies subjectively experienced affect with specific neurochemical systems. Indeed, prosocial affects demonstrate some of the clearest relationships between emotions and specific neurochemicals. Also, this distinction distinguishes developmental-interactionist theory from many recent emotion theories, which often overlook or implicitly or explicitly deny that sex, bonding, and attachment are emotions. The proposition that selfish affects are particularly associated with the right hemisphere (RH) and prosocial affects with the left hemisphere (LH) is not central to my theory, but it is a hypothesis that if supported would constitute important evidence for its validity and usefulness. My reply first considers Gray's central argument that a prosocial-selfish distinction is not necessary to account for hemispheric differences in affect, and I then address the more general issue of prosocial biological affects.

The first question involves whether prosocial biological affects help us to understand hemispheric differences in affect and emotion. In my 1999 article, I did not attempt a comprehensive review of this literature, but I did raise the possibility that a prosocial-selfish distinction might be useful in resolving apparent discrepancies. In particular, I noted that, operationally, a prosocial-selfish distinction may often be confused with a positive-negative distinction. Gray (2002) summarized the evidence presented in the 1999 article associating prosocial affects with the LH, but arguably he did not completely consider important points.

First, Gray (2002) reviewed Buck and Duffy's (1980) evidence that the"RH might be associated with the spontaneous expression of emotion, whereas the LH is associated with learned rules" ( Buck, 1999, p. 317). This comment relates to indications that, like non- brain-damaged comparison persons, RH-damaged patients showed evidence of responding to display rules, being relatively more communicative on familiar slides and noncommunicative on unpleasant slides. In contrast, LH-damaged persons were equally communicative across slide categories, suggesting that they were unique among the groups in not responding to learned rules and expectations about expression. Gray (2002) argued that, although relevant to emotional expression, this evidence"does not clearly bear on subjectively experienced emotion" (p. 732). My reply is that evidence relating to expression should usually be relevant to subjective experience as well, unless there are specific indications to the contrary. This is based on the theory that spontaneous emotional expression and subjectively experienced affect are both involuntary readouts reflecting motivational-emotional systems ( Buck, 1984, 1994b). Therefore, I argue that the evidence that RH-damaged patients tend to follow display rules and that LH-damaged patients do not is consistent with the notion that the LH is associated with learned display rules, the operation of which reflects prosocial emotions.

Furthermore, Gray (2002) argued that slides of familiar people interpreted as eliciting prosocial affects were in fact familiar and pleasant, whereas those interpreted as eliciting selfish affects were in fact unpleasant and unfamiliar. He argued,"familiar-novel and pleasant-unpleasant distinctions are better validated and more basic in terms of information processing, and so preferable to a prosocial-selfish distinction" (p. 732). Certainly, familiar-novel and pleasant-unpleasant distinctions are common and can be operationalized relatively easily in the experimental designs currently prevailing in cognitive neuroscience. However, in the case of familiarity, it can be argued that prosociality trumps familiarity both ontogenetically and phylogenetically: Newborn infants and simple creatures that do not respond to familiarity do demonstrate prosocial behaviors. Furthermore, in the case of pleasantness, the notion that prosociality is easily confused with pleasantness and selfishness with unpleasantness was exactly the point I made in my 1999 article suggesting that the prosocial-selfish distinction may prove relevant to hemispheric differences. Hence, I argue that a prosocial-selfish distinction has the potential to make a unique contribution to our understanding of hemispheric differences, over and above those of familiarity and pleasantness.

Gray (2002) reviewed Ross, Homan, and Buck (1994), involving emotion reports from patients whose RH was inactivated in the Wada test. He stated correctly that reports of selfish emotions were minimized or denied in 8 of these 11 patients and that such results could be due to lower emotional arousal. However, Gray did not mention that four of these patients showed a change from fear or anger to prosocial emotion, for example, from being angry at incompetent physicians to being sorry for making so much trouble, or from being angry at being teased as a child to being embarrassed. These patients asserted fear or anger before and after the Wada test but denied it when the RH was inactivated and instead asserted prosocial emotions. With due regard to the small sample and the fact that effects of Wada tests can be variable, these observations are consistent with the notion that, under some circumstances, RH inactivation can produce changes from selfish to prosocial emotions.

Gray (2002) argued that there is a lack of specificity in the discussion in my 1999 article of the lateralized activation of limbic structures reported by Gur and his colleagues ( Gur et al., 1995). The results of that study are particularly compelling because they parallel what would be predicted from MacLean's (1993) theory. Gray noted that left-lateralized cingulate areas are associated with pain. Indeed, the relatively strong left lateralization of this region is difficult to reconcile with hypotheses that the LH is associated with positively valenced behavior. However, it is not contrary to the prosocial hypothesis. In the opioid-dependence theory of attachment, Jaak Panksepp (1991, 1998) suggested specific links between prosocial-attachment emotions and pain mechanisms. Gray also questioned why only two of six noncingulate limbic areas had more right-sided metabolic activity. Actually, three areas had a preponderance of right-sided activity, and they are ones particularly involved in emotion: the amygdala, the insula, and the parahippocampal gyrus ( Gur et al., 1995, Figure 2b). The right-sided activity in these noncingulate regions of the limbic system areas is compatible with the association of selfish emotion with the RH. I submit that the relative left-sidedness of cingulate and right-sidedness of noncingulate limbic areas, together with MacLean's (1993) theory that the former are prosocial and the latter selfish, constitute persuasive evidence that a prosocial-selfish distinction may help to explain hemisphere differences in emotion.

Language and Emotion

Another area of evidence consistent with the association of prosocial emotion with the LH is the association of the LH with language. The learning and use of language arguably is not cold but rather must involve strong affects/emotions that may be unique to human beings and are fundamentally prosocial ( Buck, 1988, 1994a). Gray (2002) characterized this as an"obscure point" (p. 733), but arguably any obscurity has resulted from a relative lack of attention to this issue in the literature, rather than a lack of importance. There is evidence that the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) is present in rudimentary form in nonhuman primates but is more developed in human beings ( LeDoux, 1986). On the left, the IPL is part of the posterior language area bordering Wernicke's area; on the right, it is associated with spatial processing. The IPL is characterized by extensive connections with the limbic system, and LeDoux (1982) suggested that it might play a major role in connecting emotional and language systems. Moreover, the primate/human brain at the subcortical level is characterized by something of a natural right-left disconnection: Structures such as the right and left amygdalae are more closely connected with ipsilateral neocortex than with each other ( Demeter, Rosene, & Van Hoesen, 1990; Wilson, Isokawa, Babb, & Crandal, 1990; Wilson et al., 1991). This implies that most connections between emotion systems and language by means of the IPL and/or other pathways are stronger with regard to left rather than right limbic structures (see Buck, 1994a). This in turn is consistent with the notion that the presumably prosocial emotion systems involved most directly in language functioning tend to be left-sided.

Other Relevant Evidence

Gray (2002) noted the Schmidt (1999) study, which can be interpreted in terms of a prosocial-selfish hypothesis. Also, in a study specifically designed to assess the LH-prosocial emotion association, Prodan, Orbelo, Testa, and Ross (2001) identified hemispheric differences in the ability to process upper versus lower facial emotional expressions. They related this to recent evidence that the RH is better able to recognize deceit ( Etcoff, Ekman, Magee, & Frank, 2000) and concluded that their results supported, albeit indirectly, the hypothesis that"modulation of socio-emotional experiences is processed mainly by the ... LH, whereas modulation of primary-emotional experiences is processed mainly by the ... RH" ( Prodan et al., p. 211).

Also, there is evidence that aggression may be associated with LH deficits as well as widely acknowledged frontal lobe abnormalities. In a single proton emission computerized tomography (SPECT) analysis, Amen, Stubblefield, Carmichael, and Thisted (1997) compared brains of 40 aggressive and 40 comparison persons. Aggressive persons showed frontal abnormalities as expected: decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex and increased activity in anteromedial portions of the frontal lobes. Aggressive persons also showed a pattern of increased relative activity in left-sided basal ganglia and/or limbic system and focal abnormalities in the left temporal lobe. Such abnormalities could potentially relate to LH deficits that interfere with prosocial affects/emotions.

Hemispheric Differences in Cognitive-Affective Processing

The well-established hemispheric asymmetries in information processing do not explain why the right and left hemispheres differ. Clearly, animals as well as human beings, and subcortical structures such as the amygdala, display right-left differences. A possible approach to an answer has come from work on the embryological origins of the right and left hemispheres. Friedrich Sanides (1978) cited a hippocampal origin for the right parietal neocortex and an insular origin for the left parietal neocortex. One of the implications is that the right neocortex may be more responsive to stimuli internal to the organism and the left neocortex to stimuli external to the organism ( Galaburda, 1980; personal communication, January 3, 2001). Such a difference could explain left-right differences in both information processing and emotional functioning. External information tends naturally to have a causal, linear, serial, and sequential organization; whereas internal information is more holistic, coexistent, synthetic, and integrative. This could underlie the left-right difference in information processing whereby the LH is more analytic and the RH more syncretic ( Tucker, 1981). At the same time, selfish emotions tend to involve stimuli internal to the organism; whereas prosocial emotions would intrinsically involve stimuli external to the individual.

Conclusions

Gray (2002) noted that cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychological, and related literatures have established"a number of hemispheric asymmetries ... on the basis of evidence almost completely independent of hypotheses about affect" (p. 732). He perhaps intended this to demonstrate that hypotheses about affect are unnecessary for understanding hemispheric asymmetries, but an alternate interpretation of the same statement is that these literatures may have been blind to an important and relevant kind of information. Certainly, if studies do not effectively measure affect/emotion and differentiate prosocial emotions from positive-selfish emotions like happiness, they will not find evidence relevant to the prosocial-selfish hypothesis.

Defining Biological Affects

Gray (2002) asserted that an empirical basis for the hypothesized prosocial-selfish distinction was not given in my 1999 article and that"to evaluate whether a prosocial-selfish distinction holds for biological affects specifically, it must be clear that a given affect is truly a biological affect" (p. 732). In fact, biological affects were defined concretely in terms of"specifiable neurochemical systems evolved by natural selection as phylogenetic adaptations ..." ( Buck, 1999, p. 306). The proposition that affects are based on neurochemical molecules existing even in simple creatures is a distinct, albeit perhaps controversial, aspect of my theory. In the 1999 article, I noted a variety of specific neurochemicals implicated in prosocial behavior: endorphins with social attachment (p. 321); oxytocin with nurturance (p. 322); vasopressin for male sociosexual behavior (p. 322); and gonadotropin releasing hormone (GnRH) for sexuality (p. 323). The notion that prosocial affects can evolve through natural selection and involve specific neurochemical underpinnings argues that they are, in fact, biological affects.

Laughing Rats

Many examples of attachment mechanisms in a wide variety of species that arguably involve prosocial biological affects and emotions were described in Carter, Lederhendler, and Kirkpatrick (1997). Recently, Panksepp and colleagues have reported evidence that rats exhibit ultrasonic chirping centered around 50 kHz, which occurs during manual tickling, play, sex, and aggression ( Panksepp & Burgdorf, 1999, 2000). Panksepp and Burgdorf (2000) suggested that this vocalization may express a"highly positive affective state" (p. 34) that may be"functionally or evolutionarily related to human laughter" (p. 26). Burgdorf and Panksepp (2001) found tickling to be positively reinforcing to rats, as evidenced by elevated operant behavior, approach behavior, and conditioned place preferences. They concluded that tickling could elicit positive social affect in rodents and that this effect is modulated by the endogenous opiates. This fits with the opioid-dependence theory of attachment noted previously ( Panksepp, 1991, 1998).

As I stated in the 1999 article,"the essence of the difference between selfish and prosocial affects is that the former support self-preservation and the latter support preservation of the species" ( Buck, 1999, p. 323). As noted, this was taken from MacLean ( 1990, 1993). Gray (2002) correctly identified this as a critical point. He questioned"to what extent the terms prosocial and selfish are able to refer to distinct motivations" (p. 731) and asked whether this point is to be argued strongly at a biological level (pp. 731-732). I do indeed argue that prosocial biological affects exist that"are not necessarily always conducive to the preservation of the individual, or even the individual's genes" ( Buck, 1999, p. 324). Of course, selfish and prosocial motivational-emotional systems normally work together: Only rarely are behaviors conducive to self-preservation at odds with issues of species preservation.

"Selfish Gene" Doctrines

Prosocial emotions were a feature of Darwin's (1872/1998) theory: he wrote,"the emotion of love ... is one of the strongest of which the mind is capable" (p. 212). This view was challenged when selection was interpreted as operating at the level of the gene ( Hauser, 1996). As Gray (2002) noted, many evolutionists including Robert Trivers (1971) came to reject the concept, and even the possibility, of prosocial biological emotions in an ultimate evolutionary perspective. Trivers (1971), Richard Dawkins (1989), William Hamilton, George Williams and others suggested that genetic self-interest is the ultimate engine of behavior ( Ridley, 1998). Fitness is based not on the survival of the individual organism but rather on inclusive fitness: the survival of the organism's genes. This selfish gene doctrine has usually been interpreted as implying that authentic prosociality-genuine altruism or"true love"-is impossible at the biological level, and this is not compatible with the notion of prosocial biological affects.

I agree with Gray (2002) that this is a critical point for the developmental-interactionist theory of prosocial affects: For prosocial biological affects to be accepted, the selfish gene position must be addressed. The notion of biological affects/emotions that support preservation of the species indeed appears, at least at first glance, to be opposed to these doctrines, because it implies that the individual will sometimes be biologically motivated to preserve the species at the expense of itself and its own individual genes. Behaviors that are conducive to the preservation of the genetic fitness of others at the expense of one's own genetic fitness are the defining feature of genuine altruism at the biological level ( E. O. Wilson, 1975).

This issue involves whether evolution can involve the selection of units above the level of the gene. Dawkins (1982) argued that the ultimate unit of evolutionary selection must be an active, germ-line replicator: that is, something whose activities determine whether copies are made of it across the span of evolutionary time. He argued that the only active replicator lasting across evolutionary timescales is the gene, so that the selfish gene is the unit of selection, a replicator motivated only to make copies of itself. Examples of apparent altruism are explained as reflecting inclusive fitness, in which helping others actually preserves one's own genes through kin selection and reciprocity. Some have proposed group-level selection as an alternative to Dawkins's theory (e.g., D. S. Wilson & Sober, 1994; Sober & D. S. Wilson, 1998). However, Dawkins (1994) argued persuasively against such attempts by noting that the group cannot be a fundamental unit of selection, because it does not last across evolutionary timescales. Instead, the group is a vehicle, not fundamental to selection. In general, group selectionists have arguably not offered a convincing alternative to Dawkins's doctrine.

The Communicative Gene Hypothesis

Benson Ginsburg and I approached the issue of"group selection" from a different point of view: the communicative gene hypothesis ( Buck and Ginsburg, 1991, 1997a, 1997b, 2000). This hypothesis maintains a gene selectionist account of evolution but rejects an atomistic view of genetic functioning, arguing that the selection of communicative relationships between genes underlies genuine altruism. Our quarrel is not with the selfish gene notion per se, but rather with an accompanying assumption-largely unexamined-of genetic atomism. This assumption is that genes are selected as units without regard to their interactive and communicative relationships with other genes:"selection purely at the level of the individual gene" ( Dawkins, 1989, pp. 84-85). We noted in contrast that all systems of communicating elements-including genes-intrinsically involve relational phenomena. Related genes can be in the same cell, in different cells, or in different individual organisms. We viewed communicative relationships of genes as active, germ-line replicators that persist across evolutionary time.

Dawkins (1982) in fact recognized that the gene does not function alone, in that genes existing today must have been good at surviving in the company of companion genes. He wrote,"it is selection in favour of the qualities needed for survival in company with other, similarly selected genes, that gives rise to the appearance of 'coadapted genomics'" ( Dawkins, 1982, p. 93). Specifically, genes are selected" for their capacity to cooperate with other genes in the gene-pool" (p. 239). Similarly,"a good gene must be compatible with, and complementary to, the other genes with which it has to share a long succession of bodies" ( Dawkins, 1989, p. 84). Contemporary genetics has shown how this complementarity involves communication: For example, recent work in stem cells has demonstrated how the functioning of genes takes place in a context of communication with genes in neighboring cells during development (see Rao & Mattson, 2001). Buck and Ginsburg (1991, 1997a, 2000) extended this notion to recognize that certain genes must cooperate with genes in other bodies: Genes that create a pheromone can only survive in the company of genes in other individual organisms that create the corresponding receptor for the pheromone. Such sending genes can only survive in communicative relationships with receiving genes in other organisms, thus extending coadapted genomics into the interactive realm of social communication.

Although groups do not persist across evolutionary timescales, such coadapted gene-to-gene communicative relationships do. An example of a primordial communicative relationship persisting across evolutionary time is sexuality, which in turn involves the active molecule in GnRH ( Meredith & Fernandes-Fewell, 1993). GnRH has interorganism communicative functions that have extended over evolutionary timescales. In the yeast Saccharomyces Cerevisiae, a peptide molecule similar to human GnRH functions as a mating pheromone, implying that these molecules were characteristic of the common ancestor of modern human beings and modern yeast. The GnRH molecule therefore evolved at least 1 billion years ago, long before the evolution of the vertebrate brain and spinal cord. Another primordial communicative relationship involves agonistic threat and submission. As I noted in my 1999 article, serotonin injections in lobsters and crayfish produce characteristic dominance postures, whereas octopamine injections (the phenol analogue of norepinephrine) produce subordinate postures ( Livingstone, Harris-Warrick, & Kravitz, 1980). Again, the implication is that these communicative molecules have been evolutionarily preserved over an enormous span of time.

Implications: True Love

Although the extension of the notion of coadaptated genes within the body of the individual organism to genes in different individual organisms is arguably fairly straightforward, the implications are far-reaching. Buck and Ginsburg (1997a) suggested that communicative genes underlie genuine altruism, as well as true empathy, rapport, intuition, and charisma: in effect, true love. Moreover, in contrast with many other evolutionist accounts, we suggested that kin selection and reciprocity are not prosocial mechanisms underlying altruism. In contrast, kin selection and reciprocity are mechanisms for restricting prosocial impulses to one's kin and allies: they are in fact mechanisms of xenophobia.

In conclusion, there is persuasive evidence that prosocial biological affects in fact exist, and the idea that they may explain hemispheric differences should be empirically examined. Gray (2002) is correct that the concept of prosocial biological affects is contrary to most selfish gene accounts of evolution, but the concept is compatible with the communicative gene hypothesis: A gene selectionist account that recognizes communicative relationships of genes as units of selection. Also, there is evidence that the prosocial-selfish distinction may indeed prove useful in explaining hemispheric differences: The Gur et al. (1995) results and the finding of an association between aggression and LH dysfunction ( Amen et al., 1996) are particularly suggestive and potentially significant in this regard.

That communication can be veridical does not of course deny the prevalence of lying and cheating. Winston Churchill said of war,"The truth is so important that it always must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies." The same, alas, may be said of love.

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Submitted: July 10, 2001 Revised: February 22, 2002 Accepted: March 17, 2002

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Source: Psychological Review. Vol. 109. (4), Oct, 2002 pp. 739-744)
Accession Number: 2002-18225-007
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1037/0033-295X.109.4.739

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The genetics and biology of true love: Prosocial biological affects and the...: EBSCOhost

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By: Ross Buck Department of Communication Sciences, University of Connecticut; Acknowledgement: I gratefully acknowledge the contributions of collaborations with Benson Ginsburg and Elliott D. Ross and suggestions from Albert Galaburda, Jaak Panksepp, and Don Tucker. Jeremy R. Gray (2002) has reviewed my developmental-interactionist theory of affect ( Buck, 1999) and has raised interesting and important questions and concerns.

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Cover Letter Hello Ms.Smyrl, I will be answering a few questions that are required for this cover letter that pertain to my essay. 1: What do you like best about your essay? - To me, I like the flow of my essay and how it hits the most common questions that people ask about love. It is informative, as a research paper should be without being overly confusing as any form of audience can read it and retain the information. 2: What was most difficult for you about writing it? - I think the most difficult part of writing this essay was the formatting and small things I had to look out for. Making sure I was formatting and typing every in text citation accurately and general formation of the paper. 3: Why do you that was difficult for you? - I believe this was difficult for me because I generally struggle with the little things and I also did not format this while I went through writing the entire essay. I let the flow of writing take over with me and I did not pay any attention to formatting while I wrote as I felt my concentration would be broken. I ultimately paid the price when I had to go back and look through the entire essay to pinpoint these issues and fix them.