At every stage of life, love is essential for human development, connection, and the reduction of loneliness. Of course, there are different kinds of love that are associated with different behaviors: for example, self-love, love for animals, parental love, romantic love, sex, and the love of friends. But how do we experience these different types of love in our bodies? Are there differences in how we feel about them?
Previous research has focused on understanding the emotional, behavioral and neural mechanisms associated with romantic and parental love, but a new study from researchers at Aalto University in Finland goes a step further, mapping the human experience of 27 different types of love.
The researchers asked participants to color in silhouettes of their bodies to show how their bodies would feel when they experienced certain types of love. They were also asked how pleasant the feeling was, how intense it was physically and mentally, and how it related to touch. Finally, participants were asked to rate the level of intimacy associated with different love types.
Researchers found that all types of love can be felt in the head, but are felt differently in other parts of the body; some spread to the chest, while others spread throughout the body.
Pärttyli Rinne, first and corresponding author of the study, said: "When we move from experiencing more intense types of love to experiencing less intense types, the sensations in the chest area become weaker. For example, love for strangers or wisdom is related to cognitive processes. It is also possible that there are pleasurable sensations in the head area. This is a question that should be studied further."
"It's worth noting that the types of love associated with close relationships are similar and are experienced most intensely, although that's not entirely surprising," Lynn said. "Love between people is divided into sexual and non-sexual. Particularly close types of love are those that have a sexual or romantic dimension."
They found that feelings of love formed a continuum, with feelings of romantic, sexual and parental love being stronger than types of love with distant partners, such as love for strangers. Love of abstract concepts, such as moral love or intellectual love, is less felt. Researchers also found a correlation between the physical and psychological feelings caused by love.
"Equally interesting, we found a strong correlation between the physical and mental intensity of an emotion and its pleasantness," Rinne said. "The more intense a love is felt physically, the stronger it is felt mentally and the more pleasurable it is."
The current study extends previous research mapping human emotional experiences. In a 2013 study, about 700 volunteers from Finland, Sweden, and Taiwan were asked to trace on a blank outline map the areas of the body that were stimulated or deactivated by one of 14 emotions, including anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, pride, and jealousy.
When they graphed the data, the researchers found that love and happiness stimulated nearly all-body activity, while depression had the opposite effect, suppressing sensation in the arms, legs, and head. Danger and fear create strong feelings in the chest, while anger is one of the few emotions that activates the arms.
In 2018, a team of Finnish researchers drew an organizational chart of 100 subjective human feelings from more than 1,000 participants and found that they could be divided into five broad categories: positive emotions, negative emotions, cognitive functions, somatic states, and illnesses. They found that there was a strong correspondence between a feeling and its corresponding physical sensation, and that there were similarities in the mind-body sensation maps between different subjective sensations. In addition to showing that conscious feelings arise from bodily feedback, these findings also advance our understanding of how physical states and illness affect subjective well-being.
In the current study, the researchers noted that they were not trying to define universal categories or "strict taxonomies" for love; instead, they wanted to examine how the context and object of love influence subjective feelings. They say their findings provide important empirical data on the similarities and differences across love types and suggest that there are important differences between these love types. Essentially, the researchers believe love should not be oversimplified into a single, discrete emotion.
Further behavioral and neuroscience research may provide a deeper understanding of the extent to which different love types share similar patterns of neural activation.
The research was published in the journal Philosophical Psychology.