Abstract
This chapter presents a conceptual review of cognitive neuroscience (CNS) studies on love. I review the methodological choices made in these studies and their conceptual implications. To give just one example, most studies treat love as something that automatically arises when people see a picture of their beloved’s face. In contrast, a study on love for mentally disabled people treats love as something that one needs to actively self-induce. I draw conclusions regarding the comparability of these different types of studies and point out how research practices could be improved.
Currently, CNS of love can only address questions regarding the neural enabling conditions of experiences of love. That the research is nonetheless regularly presented as if it gives further insight into love itself has to do with unwarranted reverse inferences. I show that it may seem as if neural evidence has been found for an idea such as ‘love makes blind’, whereas in fact neural results were interpreted along the lines of a pre-existing idea. As long as the reverse inference is treated as a hypothesis requiring further testing, this can be innocent enough. Yet such inferences are often mistaken for results. Incentives to repeat existing interpretations exacerbate this problem.
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Notes
- 1.
CNS is sometimes distinguished from social and affective neuroscience. In that case, CNS studies cognitive processes such as perception and memory, whereas social and affective neuroscience studies processes like cooperation, aggression, and indeed love. In this book, I use CNS as an umbrella term, referring to investigations into the neurobiological mechanisms underlying all mental processes.
- 2.
I did an additional search in January 2022 which resulted in seven further studies that fit the inclusion criteria. None of these use a different type of task from the ones analyzed here. Two studies investigate love regulation, a topic that was not addressed in the studies analyzed here. Recent studies therefore add a research question, but apart from that, this chapter’s analysis stands as is. Appendix A contains information on recent studies for completion’s sake. CNS as a whole has moved on considerably more than CNS of love, however. Chapter 6 includes a section on prediction paradigms which have become increasingly prevalent in the past years.
- 3.
This is not to say that research into the paternal brain does not exist, for it certainly does (Provenzi et al. 2021). It is just not described in terms of paternal love. More about this in the next section, when I discuss issues of labelling.
- 4.
Among the seven recent studies, two aim to investigate ‘love regulation’. For details, see Appendix A.
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van Stee, A. (2022). Cognitive Neuroscience of Love. In: Love and Selfhood. New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06801-0_2
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