Infatuation Rules
Infatuation Rules
Photo: Tatiana Syrikova
Romantic love occurs due to a combination of general attraction and social factors. When another person is attracted to you or likes you, that can increase your own liking, leading to romantic love. A potential union that satisfies general social norms can contribute to people falling in love.
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Read More »A question that receives quite a bit of attention in the psychological literature is why people fall in love. One promising answer is that romantic love occurs when the attributes that generate general attraction and the social factors and circumstances that produce passion are particularly strong.
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Read More »The researchers argue that the self-expansion model proposed in Aron & Aron (1986) predicts this weighing of factors. On the self-expansion model, we have the greatest propensity to fall in love when we perceive the other person as a way for us to undergo rapid self-expansion. Entering a committed relationship requires giving up some of our personal autonomy by including the other person in our life. If the other person possesses desirable characteristics, their presence in our life can be perceived as an expansion of the self rather than a loss of freedom (Aron & Aron, 1996). Work in neuroscience supports these findings in psychology. The neurochemical profile of people who are in love is characterized by low levels of the satiation chemical serotonin (Zeki, 2007). In this respect, the obsessive component of new love makes it similar to obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is unsurprising, then, that several of the passion-generating factors, including arousal/unusualness, readiness, and mystery, correlate both with the propensity to fall in love and with increased anxiety. Blood levels of adrenaline and other stress chemicals are increased by anxiety triggers. As argued by Dutton and Aron (1974), feeling increased levels of adrenaline is sometimes mistaken for a feeling of being in love with a person. Dutton and Aron (1974) found that more men fell in love with an attractive female interviewer when she asked them questions in anxiety-provoking situations (a fear-arousing suspension bridge) compared to calm situations (a non-fear arousing bridge). So, even in the absence of most of the other predictors of the onset of romantic love, meeting someone in an anxiety-provoking situation can cause us to fall in love with that person. Another interesting feature of love is that a felt proximity to a new lover creates higher levels of the reward and motivation chemical dopamine, whereas distance can lead to cravings. Aron et al (2005) used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study people who were intensely in love from between 1 and 17 months. The subjects viewed a photograph of their beloved and then, after a distraction-attention task, they viewed a photograph of a familiar individual. The researchers found heightened brain activation in the right ventral tegmental area and the right postero-dorsal body and medial caudate nucleus—dopamine-rich areas associated with reward and motivation—in response to the photographs of the individual the subject was in love with. So, when you are in love, the imagined or actual presence of the beloved is rewarding and motivating. The self-expansion model proposed by Aron & Aron (1986) can explain be used to explain this result: When a person conceives of their love interest and him- or herself forming a tight union, the desirable characteristics of the beloved trigger a reward response. This can prompt us to go out of our way to be with our potential partner in order to experience the most intense feeling of reward.
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Read More »The self-expansion model also predicts that the similarity and propinquity factors should have a paradoxical effect in initial stages of falling in love but should have a more significant influence on the duration of love (Acevedo & Aron, 2009). The main reason is that familiarity and similarity make it less likely that the other person will constitute an expansion of you, once you include him or her in your life. These predictions are consistent with findings in neuroscience. Low levels of serotonin are likely counteracted by similarity and familiarity, which can prevent people from falling in love (Zeki, 2007). At later stages of a love relationship, however, these same factors may correlate with higher levels of the attachment and bonding chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin, which have been shown to increase during the phase of a love relationship that fosters romantic attachment and pair bonding (Zeki, 2007).
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