Julia Chivu ‘ 23

Figure 1  A person looking off to the side while clutching a neon red heart in a dimly lit environment. 

Love has compelled psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists, and other scholars to try and understand its complexities and implications. Researchers from Aalto University sought to understand how 27 different types of love, including parental, romantic, sexual, and religious love, are perceived and experienced throughout the human body. The team aimed to identify the locations in the body in which people feel each form of love. The investigation assessed how each type of love related to a set of emotional characteristics, and strived to find commonality among different forms of love.

The study was composed of three experiments. In the first experiment, 128 participants utilized a tool called emBODY. The tool allowed participants to indicate the physical areas in which they felt bodily sensations when experiencing each type of love on a computer-generated body model. The second experiment consisted of 162 participants. Using a slider, they rated each type of love based on its intensity in the body and in the mind, controllability, emotional significance, association with bodily touch, and their recollection of when they last experienced that particular emotional sensation. Finally, in the third experiment, 249 participants were tasked with arranging the randomly organized love terms in clusters of how similar they felt to one another on a screen. The data collected from each experiment was analyzed using various statistical and filtering techniques.

The first experiment revealed that each type of love was associated with different parts of the body. However, the data demonstrated that all types of love were strongly felt in the head and chest. Based on these reported findings and the statistical analysis methods, body maps of love were created. Each body map was ranked in order from the strongest sensation of love throughout the body to the weakest. In the second experiment, participants reported having the least control in kinship related love and having the most control over self-love. It was also detailed how the participants felt love for nature more recently than their experience of love for God. Based on these findings, future research can investigate the extent to which different types of love share similar neural activation patterns. The final experiment revealed that people formed strong connections based on ‘interpersonal love’ and ‘love for ideas and nonhuman animals’. Ultimately, these findings offer a better understanding of how complexly love connects with the mind, body, and our emotions.

Works Cited: 

[1] P. Rinne, et al., Body maps of love. Philosophical Psychology (2023). doi: 10.1080/09515089.2023.2252464.

[2] Image retrieved from: https://www.piqsels.com/en/public-domain-photo-jsvjp