Increasing Love Feelings, Marital Satisfaction, and Motivated Attention to the Spouse

Scientific research on romantic love has been relatively sparse but is becoming more prevalent, as it should. Unfortunately, several misconceptions about romantic love are becoming entrenched in the popular media and/or the scientific community, which hampers progress. Therefore, I refute six misconceptions about romantic love in this article. I explain why (1) romantic love is not necessarily dyadic, social, or interpersonal, (2) love is not an emotion, (3) romantic love does not just have positive effects, (4) romantic love is not uncontrollable, (5) there is no dedicated love brain region, neurotransmitter, or hormone, and (6) pharmacological manipulation of romantic love is not near. To increase progress in our scientific understanding of romantic love, I recommend that we study the intrapersonal aspects of romantic love including the intensity of love, that we focus our research questions and designs using a component process model of romantic love, and that we distinguish hypotheses and suggestions from empirical findings when citing previous work.

Science is starting to unravel the neural basis of romantic love. The goal of this literature review was to identify and interpret the electrophysiological correlates of romantic love. Electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potential (ERP) studies with a design that elicits romantic love feelings were included. The methods of previous EEG studies are too heterogeneous to draw conclusions. Multiple ERP studies, however, have shown that beloved stimuli elicit an enhanced late positive potential (LPP/P3/P300), which is not due to familiarity, positive valence, or objective beauty. This effect occurs in Western and Eastern cultures and for pictorial and verbal information, and results from bottom-up rather than top-down factors. Studies have also shown that beloved stimuli elicit an early posterior negativity (EPN), which also does not seem to be due to familiarity or positive valence. Data on earlier ERP components (P1, N1, P2, N170/VPP, N2) is scarce and mixed. Of course, the enhanced LPP and EPN are not specific to romantic love. Instead, they suggest that the beloved captures early attention, within 200–300 ms after stimulus onset that is relatively resource-independent, and subsequently receives sustained motivated attention. Future research would benefit from employing cognitive tasks and testing participants who are in love regardless of relationship status.

Married couples are attracting attention of psychologists. Generally, feelings of love are studied as a predictor, and psychological wellbeing as an effect of relationship satisfaction. Since feelings of love change in time, the purpose of this research is to study gender and age differences and identify predictors of love for spouse. Although relationship satisfaction probably is the strongest predictor of love, the psychological wellbeing and subjective loneliness also matters. 387 couples with marriage duration from six months to 50 years were studied. Methods: Rubin’s love and liking scale; Psychological wellbeing scale (Ryff), Loneliness scale (Russell et al.); self-report of relationship satisfaction with cognitive (satisfaction, desire to maintain marriage, divorce) and emotional (negative feelings, tension, fear of parting) issues. Dispersion, correlation, factorial and regression analysis were used. Results: Men’s love is stronger than women’s one and more stable throughout marriage. The lowest relationship satisfaction and the most pronounced love were found in 3–7 years of marriage. Common predictors of love for a partner are relationship satisfaction and the partner’s psychological wellbeing; a specific predictor for men is a low level of subjective loneliness, and for women it is the husband’s love for her, his subjective loneliness and her fear of parting. Spouses who express a desire to divorce are characterized by weak love for a partner, men are not satisfied with the relationship and both spouses have a reduced level of psychological wellbeing: women are not competent enough, men have difficulty setting life goals, and both partners have low self-acceptance.