Episode: 2488
Title: HPR2488: Psychology of Love
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2488/hpr2488.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 04:02:17

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This is an HPR episode 2488 entitled Psychology of Love.
It is hosted by first time both RSA and in about 13 minutes long and Karim an exquisite flag.
The summary is a look at some of the neuroscience and psychology behind love.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org.
Hi, this episode of HPR is about the neuroscience and psychology behind love.
I'm RSA. I had a few different podcast episode ideas in my mind but when I saw that valentine
stay was approaching I thought I'll do a romantic interview to HPR.
To give you a bit of a background my main degree is in electronics engineering and I also have a
diploma in psychological counseling and guidance. Mainly I consider myself an interested amateur
in psychology and neuroscience. By the way my accent is pretty much transparent to me so if there are
particular phrases or words that I pronounce too differently and yeah it's okay to let me know.
Please let me know. Now let's dive into the neuroscience of love. First a bit of a disclaimer.
Sometimes people tend to think that describing the chemical reactions behind love means that you're
just reducing love to a chemical reaction. Like love is just a chemical reaction.
That's only as true as saying poem is just being on paper or your child is just a bunch of
subatomic particles. It sounds kind of profound but really it's basically meaningless in real life
unless you reduce every part of the universe to such simplistic use. With that said the main
neurochemicals involved in love are dopamine and oxygen and vasopressin which are similar to
each other. First dopamine. Dopamine is commonly associated with reward and pleasure might have
come across it in the context of addiction and it plays a major role there but dopamine's main
function is to let you know that you have done something evolutionarily good or that things
is good. Those little surges of pleasure you get from solving a puzzle or fixing a bug they
come mostly from dopamine and in the context of romantic love is just found that the dopamine
rich areas of the brain the reward centers of the brain light up and show activity when you're
reminded of your loved one through a photo through their voice. It seems that simply their
photo or a recollection of their memory is enough to give you a little surge of pleasure to
make you feel pleased to think about them and from an evolutionary perspective that makes sense
because your brain wants to be reproduced it wants you to pause on your genes and with humans
your partner your loved one is the way brain gets to do that. Dopamine is also the reason that
romantic love especially yang love often feels like an addiction like any other behavior that's
regulated by dopamine. This part of it also has the potential for addiction a kind of addiction
we'll come back to that. The other part the other neurochemical that's major involved in romantic love
is oxytocin. Oxytocin again has a popular name it's sometimes called the cuddle hormone or
the pounding hormone. This kind of names can be helpful but they can also be misleading if you're a
programmer think of the if keyword if people started calling the if keyword the error and
exception checking keyword if you think about it that kind of makes sense because many many use
of the if keyword if and else are for error checking and some basic exception handling but you
know that fundamentally they're very different things and similar to that the neurochemicals and
neurotransmitters in the brain have multiple functions they are basic elements in a very complex
and very interactive process so these only give you a vague generalized idea so oxytocin in particular
gets this name the pounding hormone because among other things it's involved in for example
trust empathy generosity and generally bonding with someone. Oxytocin basically gives your brain
a way to record this person is important to me on the flip side of it it also encourages
in-group mentality it increases the kind of us versus them mentality and it makes you think
or care less about people outside your group it increases the in-group bonding
but it decreases out-group empathy but in relation to romantic love there has been a finding
that oxytocin apparently increases your fidelity to your partner it's been found that a small
dose of oxytocin makes committed partners more distant and less interested in people of the
opposite sex whereas the same dose of oxytocin didn't do anything with single people so
apparently our brain deep inside knows about fidelity and regulates for it these and other parts
of brain chemistry also impact and explain some of our normal romantic interactions and issues
for example when you're infatuated with someone that kind of romantic interaction is mostly based
on dopamine it's based on this internal reward of pleasure and excitement that's what gets
your heart going but it also turns out that kind of passionate infatuated love also leads to
decrease in the areas of your brain that are related to mentalizing or creating a theory of mind
this mentalizing is what lets you understand that other people's thoughts and emotions are
distinct from yours and can go in different directions because these parts of the brain are
less active in infactuation on the one hand it gets the person feeling like them and their partner
are united as the same person around the flip side of it it also makes it more difficult for an
infatuated young person to make sense of and reconcile with the differences between them and their
partner a little bit of infatuation keeps the relationship passionate and exciting but allowing
that dominate your romantic feelings leads you to not really understanding the other person's mind
and truly creating a mature relationship on the other end of it there has also been some research
into so-called selfless love the kind of love practiced in some kinds of meditation the study
this kind of selfless love does not activate the reward centers of the brain as much as romantic
love does and so does not involve that dopamine rush and that feeling of addiction so when you see
a couple have been together for 30 or 40 years and still in love with each other most probably
they have discovered this kind of selfless love for each other while also maintaining a little
bit of passion through that little bit of infatuation the secret is in finding the right mixture
between infatuation and mentalizing and selfless love okay so far we have remained within the
realm of rigorous scientific studies now we are going to enter some debtary where things are less
rigorously study less rigorously known but things that have been very useful for many relationships
the first is something called the five love languages the five different ways in which people
express love and therefore the ways in which they expect to receive love the ways in which they
understand love the concept is from a book by Gary Chapman and he divides the languages
love into five categories they are all expressions of love but for different people different languages
speak more loudly so the languages he mentions are time words gifts actions in physical touch
so basically you can express your love to someone through spending a lot of time with them
giving them caring and affirmative words doing acts of service that make them more comfortable
that makes their lives better through physical intimacy like hugs and hurdles and of course sex
or by giving them valuable gifts the idea is that if you are a type of person who sees giving
your time to someone as your most valuable act of love and if your partner expresses and receives
love by giving and receiving gifts then if you don't understand this difference in your languages of
love neither of your affection for each other will be properly communicated when people understand
and adjust for the other person's language of love that leads to better relationship and a more
long-lived relationship that's one aspect of communication in a relationship there's another
access along which people have divided communication relationship a kind based on experience rather than
rigorous studies this is the ask culture versus the guess culture this can be a culture in terms
of actual nationalities different cultures or in terms of simply different upbringing in different
families the family cultures but in either case the guess culture is one based on empathy
and anticipating the other person's needs in a guess culture minor things that you want from the
other person that make your life more comfortable are left unsaid because the expectation is that
the other person will understand and act on it based on empathy and mutual understanding
so a guess culture is where you don't ask the other person for minus favors that you would like
to be done but you only ask them for things that you really need get done and the other things are
supposed to get done automatically in contrast to that the ask culture is where you're allowed
and encouraged to ask for anything that you prefer the other person does regardless of which
importance and regardless of how obvious that need already is so in an ask culture anything can
be asked for and importantly saying no to things is regularly expected to an ask person and no
is just part of a regular interaction and doesn't mean much but to a guess person who already makes
the request only when it's of sufficient importance and no is a big deal there are advantages and
disadvantages to both sides for example the ask culture is obviously clearer in communication
whereas the guess culture has more chance of miscommunication on the other hand people in
guess cultures often feel more closer and more intimate because they have anticipated the other
person's needs instead of needing words while an ask person might go to the extreme of not giving up
their seat for a pregnant woman and then saying why did you ask for it so both cultures work in
different ways for different people but there can be and are clashes and they both get together
and try to make a relationship work if they don't understand that communication works differently
for the other person there's a lot of chance of misunderstanding and unnecessary conflicts
this ask versus guess culture idea has also been very useful for many relationships
and as far as I can tell it seems to have originated on the internet from a post on meta filter
and then been picked up by so many others neither this culture divide nor those languages of love
are precise and unique people generally are made up of a mixture of these different kinds of
communication just with one or two of those as their primary most effective means of communicating
and expressing love so that's about it for today I hope that the world went through neuroscience
and psychology and counseling and finally to internet posts was overall useful and maybe even
contained a couple of things that you might use for this Valentine's Day wish you all a very happy
Valentine's Day and talk to you later bye bye
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