Summary: A new study looks at how cognition affects love.
Source: UMSL.
When University of Missouri–St. Louis psychology faculty member Sandra Langeslag tells people that she researches love, the reactions she gets are mixed.
Students immediately lean in. Fellow professors, researchers and even small-talking strangers are intrigued.
Journal editors are contradictory. Funding providers can be skeptical.
“I get totally polarized responses,” Langeslag says with a smile from her fourth-floor office in Stadler hall. “People either love it or they hate it and think I’m crazy.”
Why such strong responses?
Everybody has something to say – and plenty of preconceived notions – about the nearly universal experience of love.
And now everyone has something to say about the professor of psychology’s research.
A study she published in August in conjunction with Erasmus University Rotterdam’s Jan Van Strien has caught the eye of several news and media publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post Canada, Cosmopolitan UK and more.
Put very briefly, the study investigates the concept of love regulation by looking at how cognition affects love. In other words, it asks: Can a person change how in love they are just by thinking? Can thinking positive thoughts about one’s beloved (he’s so smart, kind and good) make positive feelings of love increase? And likewise: Can thinking negative thoughts (she’s always messy, we have no future together) make love feelings decrease?
The data Langeslag has collected, a combination of measurable participant responses and brainwave analysis, points to an affirmative answer to all of these questions.
Yes. Love – a feeling many people say they simply can’t control – might just be controllable after all.
Why is this so exciting?
There are several instances in life when being able to change one’s feelings of love might be useful and even beneficial for emotional health and well-being.
“Imagine if you love someone who doesn’t love you back,” Langeslag offers as one example. “Or maybe you are happily married and now you develop this crush on someone else, but you don’t want to develop this crush because your marriage is good.”
The opposite can be true as well.
“There are also situations where people may be less in love than they want to be,” she further explains. “We know that in long-term relationships love feelings can decline over time, and that can cause breakups or divorces where people say things like, ‘We don’t hate each other and no one cheated, but we’re just not in love anymore.’”
Langeslag clarifies that while the results are definitely intriguing, they aren’t as simple as they may first seem.
“It’s not like we have an on or off switch and you think about negative things and now you’re not in love at all anymore.”
The effects, she says, at least in this initial study, appear to be smaller and more temporary than that. But what if they weren’t?
Here at UMSL, through her Neurocognition of Emotion and Motivation Lab, Langeslag and her students are busy investigating that question and many more.
They examine how love improves cognition.
“In my previous work,” Langeslag explains, “I’ve shown that people have more attention for any information that has to do with their beloved. For example, if your beloved is a fan of Brad Pitt, now you will notice movie posters with Brad Pitt on them even though you don’t care about Brad Pitt. People remember stuff that has to do with their beloved more than with someone else.”
And they study the reverse – how love harms cognition.
“Think of people who say, ‘I just can’t focus on my work or my homework. I’m thinking about this person all of the time.’ Does that increased cognition about things that have to do with one’s beloved come at a cost? Does it make you worse at tasks you should be doing?”
The potential real-world application of such inquiries is part of what encouraged Langeslag to make love her main research focus in the first place, back when she was an undergraduate student herself.
Indeed, it’s also part of what drew her to her field of biopsychology – a specialty area under the broader banner of psychology in which biology – hormones, chemicals, neurological processes and the like – inform and intersect with the study of human behavior.
It’s a discipline that many people don’t know exists.
In fact, Langeslag says she used to be one of those people.
She tells a story of going to another university’s version of UMSL Day, back before she started her undergraduate studies. Her friend was interested in psychology, and so she found herself surrounded by information about programs and options for study. She picked up a biopsychology book and things began to click.
“I was like, ‘Hold on. Is that a thing?’” she says with a laugh. “I went through this textbook and I realized it was about the brain, and hormones and everything, and I was like, ‘Well that’s it. That’s what I need to do.’”
Langeslag says that now, in the classes she teaches on human learning and memory and emotions and the brain, students are also excited by those same intersections, as well as the moments when research connects to lived experience.
“We discuss the research in class, and the studies often point to, ‘Oh yeah, I do that too,’ or, ‘Oh yeah, I feel that too,’” she says. “So it’s applicable. It’s meaningful in a tangible way. That’s exciting.”
Source: Jami Hirsch – UMSL
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Full open access research for “Regulation of Romantic Love Feelings: Preconceptions, Strategies, and Feasibility” by Sandra J. E. Langeslag, and Jan W. van Strien in PLOS ONE. Published online August 16 2016 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0161087
[cbtabs][cbtab title=”MLA”]UMSL “The Science Behind Love.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 20 January 2017.
<https://neurosciencenews.com/love-psychology-neuroscience-5982/>.[/cbtab][cbtab title=”APA”]UMSL (2017, January 20). The Science Behind Love. NeuroscienceNew. Retrieved January 20, 2017 from https://neurosciencenews.com/love-psychology-neuroscience-5982/[/cbtab][cbtab title=”Chicago”]UMSL “The Science Behind Love.” https://neurosciencenews.com/love-psychology-neuroscience-5982/ (accessed January 20, 2017).[/cbtab][/cbtabs]
Abstract
Regulation of Romantic Love Feelings: Preconceptions, Strategies, and Feasibility
Love feelings can be more intense than desired (e.g., after a break-up) or less intense than desired (e.g., in long-term relationships). If only we could control our love feelings! We present the concept of explicit love regulation, which we define as the use of behavioral and cognitive strategies to change the intensity of current feelings of romantic love. We present the first two studies on preconceptions about, strategies for, and the feasibility of love regulation. Questionnaire responses showed that people perceive love feelings as somewhat uncontrollable. Still, in four open questions people reported to use strategies such as cognitive reappraisal, distraction, avoidance, and undertaking (new) activities to cope with break-ups, to maintain long-term relationships, and to regulate love feelings. Instructed up-regulation of love using reappraisal increased subjective feelings of attachment, while love down-regulation decreased subjective feelings of infatuation and attachment. We used the late positive potential (LPP) amplitude as an objective index of regulation success. Instructed love up-regulation enhanced the LPP between 300–400 ms in participants who were involved in a relationship and in participants who had recently experienced a romantic break-up, while love down-regulation reduced the LPP between 700–3000 ms in participants who were involved in a relationship. These findings corroborate the self-reported feasibility of love regulation, although they are complicated by the finding that love up-regulation also reduced the LPP between 700–3000 ms in participants who were involved in a relationship. To conclude, although people have the preconception that love feelings are uncontrollable, we show for the first time that intentional regulation of love feelings using reappraisal, and perhaps other strategies, is feasible. Love regulation will benefit individuals and society because it could enhance positive effects and reduce negative effects of romantic love.
“Regulation of Romantic Love Feelings: Preconceptions, Strategies, and Feasibility” by Sandra J. E. Langeslag, and Jan W. van Strien in PLOS ONE. Published online August 16 2016 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0161087
