Episode Transcript
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(00:02):
Welcome to the Psychology of Romance podcast, where doctor Carlos discusses the latest research
and insight on relationships. Now here'syour host, Doctor Carlos. Welcome back
(00:34):
everybody. Today we have a greatguest, doctor Sandra longest Log. She
obtained her PhD in Biological and cognitivepsychology at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in
the Netherlands. She's the Associate Professorof Behavior of Neuroscience and Associate Department Chair
at the University of Missouri in SaintLouis. And today we're going to be
talking about neurocognition and love that it'skind of you'll see whatever you want to
(00:57):
get there. It's going to bea fascinating topic as we we'll go into
the brain and what happens to uswhen we're romantically in love. Before we
get started, to make sure toshare subscribe hit that like love Like button,
button Love button too. And let'sget started out with doctor Shark's long
is Log. Welcome doctor, thankyou, thanks for having me, Thank
you very much for being here.This is a fascinating topics. And everybody
(01:19):
looks at love, but they lookat it differently. Usually I've seen things
like oxytocin release and how affection happens, but never really knewer cognitively. So
I'm excited about this. I guessmy question, the first question to you
is what got you motivated to studythat? Yeah, So after high school
I had to decide to go touniversity and what major to do, and
(01:42):
I decided on biological psychology. Assoon as I discovered that that was a
thing, I was like, that'swhat I want to do. And at
the time, I was also veryheartbroken because my boyfriend at the time had
broken up with me and then Ifell in love with someone else, so
then I was head over heels.And so then when I started my psychology
degree, whenever we had to writea paper or something for a class,
(02:06):
I would always try to write aboutthe neural basis of romantic love. And
that's when I discovered that there wasn'ta whole lot of There weren't a whole
lot of studies on the topic,and so that's when I eventually thought,
well, what if I start tostudy this topic. Oh, fascinating,
that's a great way to do it. That's interesting. I always tell students
a lot of times to you know, if you have a niche that you
(02:27):
like, try to write as manypapers as you can. It really does
help after a while. That's fascinating, all right, So let's get into
it. And I know our audienceis mixed, just to kind of give
you an FYI. So we havea lot of grand students that are going
to be listening in psychology, andwe'll also have some science based and then
we'll have the general population. Soyou know, you feel free to bounce
back and forth wherever we go withit. So I guess what's the first
(02:53):
thing that we can you studied inregards to love and new or cognition,
anything that pops out for you.Well, So I started off really doing
a study on romantic love for mymaster's thesis, and that that study was
an event related potential study, andthat means you put a cap on the
(03:15):
participant's head and electrodes in the capmeasure the electrical response of the brain to
certain stimuli. So in this case, they were pictures of people's beloved and
so we could see how the brainresponded to those pictures of a beloved,
a friend, and then an anextremely beautiful stranger. And we saw that
(03:37):
people paid more attention to their belovedthan to their friend and the beautiful stranger
because the brain waves that we cansee with that method with ERP, one
of those brain waves indicates attention.So that's how we knew that they were
made attention to the beloved. It'sa it's called the LPP, the late
positive potential. So so yeah,bada will be ee g. But we
(04:00):
did ERP. So the late positivepotential is an ERP component that indicates motivated
attention. Yeah, well that's good. There's a lot of hope to people
out there. There's a lot ofhope to people out there. They're worried
about looking at someone else. Yeah. So the idea is that your beloved
(04:20):
is a very emotional stimulus to you, but not to other people because the
people could just be a random person, but that you pay more attention to
your beloved because they are so soemotionally salient for you. Yep, brain
structure was can you pinpoint structures withevent related potentials? You you don't know
(04:42):
where in the brain signals coming from, so we don't know which brain region
that comes from. Okay, inno worries. And when you did that,
did you measure it? In differentcapacities. I guess I'm thinking in
my head right now, it's usouslywhat happens, random thoughts. But do
celebrities make a difference like movie starsor singers? Would that have impacted it?
(05:05):
So I did not test that,but other research have used or other
research has used celebrities as instead ofa friend, so they for example,
looked at beloved and then celebrities asbeing someone that you're familiar with, And
well, I would have to lookat those days. But off the top
of my head, I would saythat people also pay more attention to celebrities
(05:26):
than strangers, but still even moreto their beloved. Yeah, I was
thinking about that because I know alot of times people get emotionally involved with
some of these individuals, right theyhave sort of a crush on the celebrity,
Then that would really increase their attentionto that celebrity. Yes, yes,
absolutely, I think what was that. I don't know how old you
are, but I know I don'tthink you are little made. But John
(05:49):
Hinckley, remember him. I don'tknow if you ever heard of him.
John. They tried to kill thepresident. He tried to kill the president
of the United States in nineteen eightyand he was doing it to capture the
love with the actress Jodi Foster.Oh. Now, yeah, schizophrenia,
so it's a little different, butstill it took him a lot. Yes.
(06:09):
Now, I know in your studiesyou've shown something about infatuated individuals.
This is something that's always fascinating tome. Infatuation. It's hard to kind
of decipher between a fatuation and love. What happened there so well, yeah,
so this is an important point thatyou're bringing up. Scientists do not
agree on the definition of love orhow many types of love humans have,
(06:32):
so that is a problem. Iuse the framework of Helen Fisher. She
has proposed that in humans we havethree distinct love systems. They have evolved
over time. The first sexual desire. The second is attraction or passionate love,
or I often call it infatuation.And it's that early stage where you're
(06:54):
very nervous butterflies in your stummach areyou for also stressful love and that's a
much calmer state of emotional bonding withanother person. That doesn't only happen for
umantic partners, but also for parentsand children and friends for example. So
(07:16):
when I talk about In my research, I talk about infatuated individuals. I
try to get participants in those earlystages, so after they've just fallen in
love, ideally within the first halfyear, but that's sometimes difficult. So
sometimes it's within the first one anda half years since they fell in love
that we try to test them.That's another question I was going to ask
you too. It's going to bethe differences and the definition of love,
(07:38):
because it gets complicated. Now youbroke up a little bit. You mentioned
the first part of love, andthen the second definition was the infatuation component.
Did you have a third part toit? It was just yah attachment.
So sexual desires the first one andan infatuation one and attachment the third.
(07:59):
Yes, okay, that's interesting.I remember years ago. I think
there was a there was a Biblestudy that I was listening to a long
time ago, and they were talkingabout the three types of love in Greek
and had a gape arrows. Ithink in Failure's love. I wonder how
that would be different. So didyou study only love in regards to romance?
I mean also did you also lookat love in regards to siblings and
(08:22):
mom and dad anything like that?So I have not an end of a
friend as a control stimulus, becausethat's someone they also know and like but
are not romantically in love with.But I so I use it as a
control stimulus. But of course youcan be attached to friends too, so
(08:43):
that in itself would be interested tostudy. But I haven't done that.
Yeah, I'll be fascinating to lookat too. Now you study the infatuation
individuals. You said something about attensionand memory. What was that all about.
Yeah, so that started off withthat first study where we know through
ringwaves that people pay more attention totheir beloved, and then in a subsequent
(09:03):
study, I replicated that finding,but then with words. So we recruited
people that were in love, andwe asked their permission to call their beloved
and their friends, and then weasked their love and their friend. They
(09:24):
generated thirty word favorite actress, what'stheir major, what's their city that they
live in, And then we showedthe participants those sixty words or thirty that
were related to the beloved and thirtythat were related to a friend. And
then we added thirty control words thatcontrolled for the content and the length and
the number of letters and things likethat. And then we show that people
even have more attention to those wordsthat are related to their beloved than to
(09:48):
words that are related to their friend. And then we also had them do
a memory task where we asked them, now, write down all the words
that you saw, and then wecounted how many beloved, friend and control
words they remembered, and they remembersignificantly more of the beloved related words.
So that shows that people don't onlyhave a lot of attention for their beloved,
(10:09):
but also information has to do whatthey're beloved, and they also remember
that better. So if you thinkabout a daylight example of that is if
you're beloved, for example, isa fan of Brad Pitts, and now
you walk past a movie theater andyou see the poster of a new movie
by Pits and so his name ison the poster. You are more that
(10:33):
name and you saw that movie posterbecause it is something that has to do
with your beloved, and so nowit becomes emotional information to you or even
just important information. That's interesting,fascinating, sting. That's fascinating because I
know a lot of people think memoriesare kind of like a polaroid picture or
something like that. You just takeit, But it really doesn't work that
(10:54):
way. It works kind of likea spider web, as we know.
So it's fascinating, and see howthat would work immediately fire's Brad Pitt boom
triggers your beloved one? Does itall you do? I don't know if
this is an opinion thing or haveyou studied it. Do you also think
it would increase the like likability factorof that movie maybe, or even of
that actor? I think so,yes. So we also ask people to
(11:16):
rate how much, how how howpleasant they felt, and how are roused
they felt when reading those words.People rate it the beloved words is significantly
more pleasant and arousing than the otherwords. Just because of the association with
your beloved, it now becomes apositive thing, even if you initially feel
neutral about rapids. That's interesting.It's almost like priming. Fascinating. Now.
(11:41):
You also talked about memory, soit sounds like, and I'm not
sure if you've looked at this ornot, but it sounds like it's we're
hitting here the amigula or the hippocampusbecause of those salient type of memories.
Am I far off on that orso? No? I think you're right
I did not, so the methodsthat are use in my research. I've
used a little bit of fMRI,which which you can use to study the
make a campus, but I haven'tused it a whole lot. I usually
(12:05):
use the EERP method, and thatdoesn't allow me to say which brain reasons
are involved. But yes, youare right. So I think what we're
seeing here is a general effect ofemotion on memory. So as soon as
something becomes emotional to you, youare more likely to remember it, and
we know from other research that that'sbecause they make the lot the hipper campus
to remember things better. So thecampus is sort of the memory brain region.
(12:28):
But I make that that can tellthe hiper campus to remember things better
because they are emotional. So Iwould that my hypothesis that that's the mechanism
for the effect of love on memoryas well. Just to be clear for
my own sake too, I'm asfamiliar with r P I know. We
look at functional MRIs. You're lookingat blood flow of things of that nature,
(12:50):
and then you have EEGs for thebrain waves. So each one is
giving us kind of a different sliceof that pie or a piece of that
puzzle for the brain. RP islooking at the electrical part of it is
that what you're saying. Yeah,so the way you measure EEG and ERP
is the same, it's just theanalysis it's slightly different. So e g.
You measure over seconds or minutes,but the event Reluy potential is the
(13:15):
electrical signal, but then specifically inresponse to a stimulus, so it might
work often a photo or a word. But yeah, so with ERP you
get really good information about when inthe brain something happens, so it has
a millisecond precision, which is reallygreat, and then it can tell us
what cognitive process is happening, suchas attention or memory or things like that,
(13:39):
whereas fMRI has a not so greattemporal resolution, so it's in the
order of seconds, but it tellsyou better where something happens in the brain,
so you get you can't really getboth of the infrace at the same
times. Either you know where oryou know when and what, but not
at the same time. It soundslike physics when you're staring at an atom
or whatever. They say exactly yes, now I know right now you're currently
(14:03):
investigating love feelings, I guess,and see how it deals with cognitive strategies.
Yes, that's right. Yeah,So what I became interested in is
can we change how in love weare by thinking certain things by using cognitive
strategies. And you can probably seewhy this would be helpful, because sometimes
people wish they were less in loveif you know that person broke up with
(14:26):
them, or if they don't lovethem, or maybe someone you're not supposed
to be in love with, likeyour boss or a student or something like
that. In that case, youmay want to decrease how in love you
are. And on the other hand, if you are in a long term
relationship, we know that love feelingsdecline over time, and so in that
case, people may want to increasetheir love feelings. If otherwise the relationship
(14:46):
is fine, they may want toincrease or at least sort of sustain their
love feelings for their partner. SoI've been trying to study can't people whether
people can do that? I wantto. I guess I'm known to open
up a lot of rabbit holes,as they say here, but I guess
I'm just curious. I don't knowif you have or will be, or
(15:07):
maybe you thought about it. Acouple of things I'm looking at right down
my head. I'm seeing one thedifference in time, the temporal difference in
regards to love. If you lovesomebody for like you said, a year,
which you kind of studied, areyou looking are you going to look
at people who've been in love forten or fifteen years? So it varies
between studies. So one paper thatis just has just been accepted for publication.
(15:31):
We looked at married individuals, sowe didn't care how long they had
been married. But the idea isthat these are sort of long term relationships
that are least supposed to last foreveruntil these one of the spouses passes away,
and see if people could increase howin love they are with their spouse.
And then we measured both infatuation andattachment and also marital satisfaction. And
(15:56):
what we saw was that especially lookingat a picture of your spouse increased love
feelings for the spouse. So that'sthat's a real simple strategy, right,
just go through some old pictures andthat increases your your love feelings for your
spouse. So that's that's really simple, will be simple to you. It'd
be interesting to see too, ifit would be a difference in looking at
(16:18):
your spouse when you first met themand then looking at them again fifteen years
later. Yeah. Yeah, Sowe just had people submit fifty pictures of
their spouse, and so we didn'twe didn't check what those pictures if it
was pictures from their marriage, fromtheir their marriage or before or after.
But that that'd be interesting. Yea, yeah, that'll be different. I
guess my last couple of questions wouldbe kind of taking her all the way
(16:41):
through, as would be gender anygender differences there. So I typically don't
study gender differences for two reasons.One is a practical reason. If you
want to study study gender differences,you need twice the number of participants because
you need men and women but thenseparately, so you need twice at least
(17:03):
twice the number of participants, sothat's often difficult. We also have kind
of difficulty often to get enough maleparticipants because we're recruiting from a psychology pool
which is mostly women. And thenmaybe men are also less likely to participate
in a study on love. I'mnot sure. So that's the practical reason.
Maybe more scientific reason is that Ithink love is not going to be
(17:29):
that different between men and women,and I'm sure there are general differences for
sure, and they have been documented. But the stuff that I'm studying,
how much attention you pay to yourbeloved, whether you have increased memory for
your beloved, whether you can increaseyour decrease love fell for your beloved.
I don't really have a real reasonto expect men and women to differ in
(17:52):
those aspects of love. So that'swhy I haven't studied it all that much.
That's interesting. Yeah, how aboutculture differences? Do you think is
anything there? For sure? Yeah, it's not something that I've studied.
But just to give you an example, this is an anecdote. This is
years ago, but I want Oneday I received an email and it was
(18:15):
from someone from India and he said, I found your research online and it
is super fascinating and very important.Please keep doing this research because it's really
important because love is such a wasteof energy and time. And I was
like, wait what, And thenI realized that if you live in a
(18:36):
culture where maybe love does not determinewho you are going to marry, because
maybe there's arranged marriages or just moreso rational marriages rather than sort of the
marriages based on love like we havein the Western world, then yes,
love is probably a waste of energyand time and resources. Now I will
(18:56):
also say that arranged marriages can bevery happy. I think forced marriages are
awful obviously, right. I thinkthere are certain cultures where arranged marriages can
work fine if people agree. AndI will also say that in our western
world we marry out of love,but that's often also not that successful given
(19:18):
the high divorce rate. So yeah, but y's definitely lots of cultural differences.
It's interesting. I know that socialPsyche. There was a study that
was done. This showed just thatdifference between arranged marriages and the Western style
version of the marriage. And theywere showing how it spikes up for Western
culture because I love, so theexcitement is there, the love is there,
(19:41):
and then it starts going down andthen tapers off over the decades.
If your arranged marriage is actually almostnot that the opposite, but it starts
off really low and then it picksup as it goes along. So that
was fascinating. And I remember talkingto an uber driver from India and I
don't know what, I don't knowhow it got onto it, but we
got to arrange marriages and he hadan arranged marriage and he was married to
(20:03):
her for thirty years and he lovedit. And I said, you know,
would you have wished to have datedaround? He said, no,
I didn't want the hassle. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it's hard
sometimes for us in Western worlds toimagine that, but I think it can
be successful again if it is notforced, right, that's true. Yeah.
(20:23):
It was really an interesting because theykind of remind me like the dating
sites that you have, because theway he did it was they had to
get they had a match up thegirl with education, they had to match
up the girl with moral values,the interviewer with the parents interviewed, or
everybody was interviewing each other, andit's like, okay, let's kind of
like match dot com. I guess, right, right, yeah, very
(20:45):
strange. Anything else you're thinking you'relooking at in the future in regards to
neurocognition and love, well, onething I want to study is the similarities
and differences between love and because thereare a lot of review papers online that
say, you know, love islike an addiction. Dopaman is probably involved
(21:07):
people seem kind of addicted to theirbeloved, and I agree with that,
but I don't think we have alot of empirical data to really say that
people are addicted to their beloved orto even show, you know, how,
how does being addicted to your beloveddiffer from being addicted to cigarettes or
alcohol or cocaine. So that thatis something that I would like to study
in the future, and I havesome plans, but I haven't started data
(21:30):
collection yet. But I really interesting. Oh absolutely, so I could definitely
see the withdrawal phase a little bitin the phase, yep, for sure.
Yeah, that could be interesting inthe craving phase, at least initially
where you can't get enough of them, you always want to talk to them
on the phone. Yep. That'sfascinating that way. I can't wait for
(21:51):
that one. We'll have to bringyou back for that, I mean like
five years or so. There yougo, Well again, folks, is
dot actor Sandra longish log It's lA n G E S l A G
and you can find her at UM S L dot eed U if you
want to look up more of herresearch and work. Professor, thank you
so much for taking the time.How thank you, Thank you everyone for
(22:14):
listening. Hey, make sure toshare, subscribe, or hit that I
like button. You know we likeit, maybe even love it. See
you next time.
Welcome to the Psychology of Romance podcast, where doctor Carlos discusses the latest research
and insight on relationships. Now here'syour host, Doctor Carlos. Welcome back
(00:34):
everybody. Today we have a greatguest, doctor Sandra longest Log. She
obtained her PhD in Biological and cognitivepsychology at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in
the Netherlands. She's the Associate Professorof Behavior of Neuroscience and Associate Department Chair
at the University of Missouri in SaintLouis. And today we're going to be
talking about neurocognition and love that it'skind of you'll see whatever you want to
(00:57):
get there. It's going to bea fascinating topic as we we'll go into
the brain and what happens to uswhen we're romantically in love. Before we
get started, to make sure toshare subscribe hit that like love Like button,
button Love button too. And let'sget started out with doctor Shark's long
is Log. Welcome doctor, thankyou, thanks for having me, Thank
you very much for being here.This is a fascinating topics. And everybody
(01:19):
looks at love, but they lookat it differently. Usually I've seen things
like oxytocin release and how affection happens, but never really knewer cognitively. So
I'm excited about this. I guessmy question, the first question to you
is what got you motivated to studythat? Yeah, So after high school
I had to decide to go touniversity and what major to do, and
(01:42):
I decided on biological psychology. Assoon as I discovered that that was a
thing, I was like, that'swhat I want to do. And at
the time, I was also veryheartbroken because my boyfriend at the time had
broken up with me and then Ifell in love with someone else, so
then I was head over heels.And so then when I started my psychology
degree, whenever we had to writea paper or something for a class,
(02:06):
I would always try to write aboutthe neural basis of romantic love. And
that's when I discovered that there wasn'ta whole lot of There weren't a whole
lot of studies on the topic,and so that's when I eventually thought,
well, what if I start tostudy this topic. Oh, fascinating,
that's a great way to do it. That's interesting. I always tell students
a lot of times to you know, if you have a niche that you
(02:27):
like, try to write as manypapers as you can. It really does
help after a while. That's fascinating, all right, So let's get into
it. And I know our audienceis mixed, just to kind of give
you an FYI. So we havea lot of grand students that are going
to be listening in psychology, andwe'll also have some science based and then
we'll have the general population. Soyou know, you feel free to bounce
back and forth wherever we go withit. So I guess what's the first
(02:53):
thing that we can you studied inregards to love and new or cognition,
anything that pops out for you.Well, So I started off really doing
a study on romantic love for mymaster's thesis, and that that study was
an event related potential study, andthat means you put a cap on the
(03:15):
participant's head and electrodes in the capmeasure the electrical response of the brain to
certain stimuli. So in this case, they were pictures of people's beloved and
so we could see how the brainresponded to those pictures of a beloved,
a friend, and then an anextremely beautiful stranger. And we saw that
(03:37):
people paid more attention to their belovedthan to their friend and the beautiful stranger
because the brain waves that we cansee with that method with ERP, one
of those brain waves indicates attention.So that's how we knew that they were
made attention to the beloved. It'sa it's called the LPP, the late
positive potential. So so yeah,bada will be ee g. But we
(04:00):
did ERP. So the late positivepotential is an ERP component that indicates motivated
attention. Yeah, well that's good. There's a lot of hope to people
out there. There's a lot ofhope to people out there. They're worried
about looking at someone else. Yeah. So the idea is that your beloved
(04:20):
is a very emotional stimulus to you, but not to other people because the
people could just be a random person, but that you pay more attention to
your beloved because they are so soemotionally salient for you. Yep, brain
structure was can you pinpoint structures withevent related potentials? You you don't know
(04:42):
where in the brain signals coming from, so we don't know which brain region
that comes from. Okay, inno worries. And when you did that,
did you measure it? In differentcapacities. I guess I'm thinking in
my head right now, it's usouslywhat happens, random thoughts. But do
celebrities make a difference like movie starsor singers? Would that have impacted it?
(05:05):
So I did not test that,but other research have used or other
research has used celebrities as instead ofa friend, so they for example,
looked at beloved and then celebrities asbeing someone that you're familiar with, And
well, I would have to lookat those days. But off the top
of my head, I would saythat people also pay more attention to celebrities
(05:26):
than strangers, but still even moreto their beloved. Yeah, I was
thinking about that because I know alot of times people get emotionally involved with
some of these individuals, right theyhave sort of a crush on the celebrity,
Then that would really increase their attentionto that celebrity. Yes, yes,
absolutely, I think what was that. I don't know how old you
are, but I know I don'tthink you are little made. But John
(05:49):
Hinckley, remember him. I don'tknow if you ever heard of him.
John. They tried to kill thepresident. He tried to kill the president
of the United States in nineteen eightyand he was doing it to capture the
love with the actress Jodi Foster.Oh. Now, yeah, schizophrenia,
so it's a little different, butstill it took him a lot. Yes.
(06:09):
Now, I know in your studiesyou've shown something about infatuated individuals.
This is something that's always fascinating tome. Infatuation. It's hard to kind
of decipher between a fatuation and love. What happened there so well, yeah,
so this is an important point thatyou're bringing up. Scientists do not
agree on the definition of love orhow many types of love humans have,
(06:32):
so that is a problem. Iuse the framework of Helen Fisher. She
has proposed that in humans we havethree distinct love systems. They have evolved
over time. The first sexual desire. The second is attraction or passionate love,
or I often call it infatuation.And it's that early stage where you're
(06:54):
very nervous butterflies in your stummach areyou for also stressful love and that's a
much calmer state of emotional bonding withanother person. That doesn't only happen for
umantic partners, but also for parentsand children and friends for example. So
(07:16):
when I talk about In my research, I talk about infatuated individuals. I
try to get participants in those earlystages, so after they've just fallen in
love, ideally within the first halfyear, but that's sometimes difficult. So
sometimes it's within the first one anda half years since they fell in love
that we try to test them.That's another question I was going to ask
you too. It's going to bethe differences and the definition of love,
(07:38):
because it gets complicated. Now youbroke up a little bit. You mentioned
the first part of love, andthen the second definition was the infatuation component.
Did you have a third part toit? It was just yah attachment.
So sexual desires the first one andan infatuation one and attachment the third.
(07:59):
Yes, okay, that's interesting.I remember years ago. I think
there was a there was a Biblestudy that I was listening to a long
time ago, and they were talkingabout the three types of love in Greek
and had a gape arrows. Ithink in Failure's love. I wonder how
that would be different. So didyou study only love in regards to romance?
I mean also did you also lookat love in regards to siblings and
(08:22):
mom and dad anything like that?So I have not an end of a
friend as a control stimulus, becausethat's someone they also know and like but
are not romantically in love with.But I so I use it as a
control stimulus. But of course youcan be attached to friends too, so
(08:43):
that in itself would be interested tostudy. But I haven't done that.
Yeah, I'll be fascinating to lookat too. Now you study the infatuation
individuals. You said something about attensionand memory. What was that all about.
Yeah, so that started off withthat first study where we know through
ringwaves that people pay more attention totheir beloved, and then in a subsequent
(09:03):
study, I replicated that finding,but then with words. So we recruited
people that were in love, andwe asked their permission to call their beloved
and their friends, and then weasked their love and their friend. They
(09:24):
generated thirty word favorite actress, what'stheir major, what's their city that they
live in, And then we showedthe participants those sixty words or thirty that
were related to the beloved and thirtythat were related to a friend. And
then we added thirty control words thatcontrolled for the content and the length and
the number of letters and things likethat. And then we show that people
even have more attention to those wordsthat are related to their beloved than to
(09:48):
words that are related to their friend. And then we also had them do
a memory task where we asked them, now, write down all the words
that you saw, and then wecounted how many beloved, friend and control
words they remembered, and they remembersignificantly more of the beloved related words.
So that shows that people don't onlyhave a lot of attention for their beloved,
(10:09):
but also information has to do whatthey're beloved, and they also remember
that better. So if you thinkabout a daylight example of that is if
you're beloved, for example, isa fan of Brad Pitts, and now
you walk past a movie theater andyou see the poster of a new movie
by Pits and so his name ison the poster. You are more that
(10:33):
name and you saw that movie posterbecause it is something that has to do
with your beloved, and so nowit becomes emotional information to you or even
just important information. That's interesting,fascinating, sting. That's fascinating because I
know a lot of people think memoriesare kind of like a polaroid picture or
something like that. You just takeit, But it really doesn't work that
(10:54):
way. It works kind of likea spider web, as we know.
So it's fascinating, and see howthat would work immediately fire's Brad Pitt boom
triggers your beloved one? Does itall you do? I don't know if
this is an opinion thing or haveyou studied it. Do you also think
it would increase the like likability factorof that movie maybe, or even of
that actor? I think so,yes. So we also ask people to
(11:16):
rate how much, how how howpleasant they felt, and how are roused
they felt when reading those words.People rate it the beloved words is significantly
more pleasant and arousing than the otherwords. Just because of the association with
your beloved, it now becomes apositive thing, even if you initially feel
neutral about rapids. That's interesting.It's almost like priming. Fascinating. Now.
(11:41):
You also talked about memory, soit sounds like, and I'm not
sure if you've looked at this ornot, but it sounds like it's we're
hitting here the amigula or the hippocampusbecause of those salient type of memories.
Am I far off on that orso? No? I think you're right
I did not, so the methodsthat are use in my research. I've
used a little bit of fMRI,which which you can use to study the
make a campus, but I haven'tused it a whole lot. I usually
(12:05):
use the EERP method, and thatdoesn't allow me to say which brain reasons
are involved. But yes, youare right. So I think what we're
seeing here is a general effect ofemotion on memory. So as soon as
something becomes emotional to you, youare more likely to remember it, and
we know from other research that that'sbecause they make the lot the hipper campus
to remember things better. So thecampus is sort of the memory brain region.
(12:28):
But I make that that can tellthe hiper campus to remember things better
because they are emotional. So Iwould that my hypothesis that that's the mechanism
for the effect of love on memoryas well. Just to be clear for
my own sake too, I'm asfamiliar with r P I know. We
look at functional MRIs. You're lookingat blood flow of things of that nature,
(12:50):
and then you have EEGs for thebrain waves. So each one is
giving us kind of a different sliceof that pie or a piece of that
puzzle for the brain. RP islooking at the electrical part of it is
that what you're saying. Yeah,so the way you measure EEG and ERP
is the same, it's just theanalysis it's slightly different. So e g.
You measure over seconds or minutes,but the event Reluy potential is the
(13:15):
electrical signal, but then specifically inresponse to a stimulus, so it might
work often a photo or a word. But yeah, so with ERP you
get really good information about when inthe brain something happens, so it has
a millisecond precision, which is reallygreat, and then it can tell us
what cognitive process is happening, suchas attention or memory or things like that,
(13:39):
whereas fMRI has a not so greattemporal resolution, so it's in the
order of seconds, but it tellsyou better where something happens in the brain,
so you get you can't really getboth of the infrace at the same
times. Either you know where oryou know when and what, but not
at the same time. It soundslike physics when you're staring at an atom
or whatever. They say exactly yes, now I know right now you're currently
(14:03):
investigating love feelings, I guess,and see how it deals with cognitive strategies.
Yes, that's right. Yeah,So what I became interested in is
can we change how in love weare by thinking certain things by using cognitive
strategies. And you can probably seewhy this would be helpful, because sometimes
people wish they were less in loveif you know that person broke up with
(14:26):
them, or if they don't lovethem, or maybe someone you're not supposed
to be in love with, likeyour boss or a student or something like
that. In that case, youmay want to decrease how in love you
are. And on the other hand, if you are in a long term
relationship, we know that love feelingsdecline over time, and so in that
case, people may want to increasetheir love feelings. If otherwise the relationship
(14:46):
is fine, they may want toincrease or at least sort of sustain their
love feelings for their partner. SoI've been trying to study can't people whether
people can do that? I wantto. I guess I'm known to open
up a lot of rabbit holes,as they say here, but I guess
I'm just curious. I don't knowif you have or will be, or
(15:07):
maybe you thought about it. Acouple of things I'm looking at right down
my head. I'm seeing one thedifference in time, the temporal difference in
regards to love. If you lovesomebody for like you said, a year,
which you kind of studied, areyou looking are you going to look
at people who've been in love forten or fifteen years? So it varies
between studies. So one paper thatis just has just been accepted for publication.
(15:31):
We looked at married individuals, sowe didn't care how long they had
been married. But the idea isthat these are sort of long term relationships
that are least supposed to last foreveruntil these one of the spouses passes away,
and see if people could increase howin love they are with their spouse.
And then we measured both infatuation andattachment and also marital satisfaction. And
(15:56):
what we saw was that especially lookingat a picture of your spouse increased love
feelings for the spouse. So that'sthat's a real simple strategy, right,
just go through some old pictures andthat increases your your love feelings for your
spouse. So that's that's really simple, will be simple to you. It'd
be interesting to see too, ifit would be a difference in looking at
(16:18):
your spouse when you first met themand then looking at them again fifteen years
later. Yeah. Yeah, Sowe just had people submit fifty pictures of
their spouse, and so we didn'twe didn't check what those pictures if it
was pictures from their marriage, fromtheir their marriage or before or after.
But that that'd be interesting. Yea, yeah, that'll be different. I
guess my last couple of questions wouldbe kind of taking her all the way
(16:41):
through, as would be gender anygender differences there. So I typically don't
study gender differences for two reasons.One is a practical reason. If you
want to study study gender differences,you need twice the number of participants because
you need men and women but thenseparately, so you need twice at least
(17:03):
twice the number of participants, sothat's often difficult. We also have kind
of difficulty often to get enough maleparticipants because we're recruiting from a psychology pool
which is mostly women. And thenmaybe men are also less likely to participate
in a study on love. I'mnot sure. So that's the practical reason.
Maybe more scientific reason is that Ithink love is not going to be
(17:29):
that different between men and women,and I'm sure there are general differences for
sure, and they have been documented. But the stuff that I'm studying,
how much attention you pay to yourbeloved, whether you have increased memory for
your beloved, whether you can increaseyour decrease love fell for your beloved.
I don't really have a real reasonto expect men and women to differ in
(17:52):
those aspects of love. So that'swhy I haven't studied it all that much.
That's interesting. Yeah, how aboutculture differences? Do you think is
anything there? For sure? Yeah, it's not something that I've studied.
But just to give you an example, this is an anecdote. This is
years ago, but I want Oneday I received an email and it was
(18:15):
from someone from India and he said, I found your research online and it
is super fascinating and very important.Please keep doing this research because it's really
important because love is such a wasteof energy and time. And I was
like, wait what, And thenI realized that if you live in a
(18:36):
culture where maybe love does not determinewho you are going to marry, because
maybe there's arranged marriages or just moreso rational marriages rather than sort of the
marriages based on love like we havein the Western world, then yes,
love is probably a waste of energyand time and resources. Now I will
(18:56):
also say that arranged marriages can bevery happy. I think forced marriages are
awful obviously, right. I thinkthere are certain cultures where arranged marriages can
work fine if people agree. AndI will also say that in our western
world we marry out of love,but that's often also not that successful given
(19:18):
the high divorce rate. So yeah, but y's definitely lots of cultural differences.
It's interesting. I know that socialPsyche. There was a study that
was done. This showed just thatdifference between arranged marriages and the Western style
version of the marriage. And theywere showing how it spikes up for Western
culture because I love, so theexcitement is there, the love is there,
(19:41):
and then it starts going down andthen tapers off over the decades.
If your arranged marriage is actually almostnot that the opposite, but it starts
off really low and then it picksup as it goes along. So that
was fascinating. And I remember talkingto an uber driver from India and I
don't know what, I don't knowhow it got onto it, but we
got to arrange marriages and he hadan arranged marriage and he was married to
(20:03):
her for thirty years and he lovedit. And I said, you know,
would you have wished to have datedaround? He said, no,
I didn't want the hassle. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it's hard
sometimes for us in Western worlds toimagine that, but I think it can
be successful again if it is notforced, right, that's true. Yeah.
(20:23):
It was really an interesting because theykind of remind me like the dating
sites that you have, because theway he did it was they had to
get they had a match up thegirl with education, they had to match
up the girl with moral values,the interviewer with the parents interviewed, or
everybody was interviewing each other, andit's like, okay, let's kind of
like match dot com. I guess, right, right, yeah, very
(20:45):
strange. Anything else you're thinking you'relooking at in the future in regards to
neurocognition and love, well, onething I want to study is the similarities
and differences between love and because thereare a lot of review papers online that
say, you know, love islike an addiction. Dopaman is probably involved
(21:07):
people seem kind of addicted to theirbeloved, and I agree with that,
but I don't think we have alot of empirical data to really say that
people are addicted to their beloved orto even show, you know, how,
how does being addicted to your beloveddiffer from being addicted to cigarettes or
alcohol or cocaine. So that thatis something that I would like to study
in the future, and I havesome plans, but I haven't started data
(21:30):
collection yet. But I really interesting. Oh absolutely, so I could definitely
see the withdrawal phase a little bitin the phase, yep, for sure.
Yeah, that could be interesting inthe craving phase, at least initially
where you can't get enough of them, you always want to talk to them
on the phone. Yep. That'sfascinating that way. I can't wait for
(21:51):
that one. We'll have to bringyou back for that, I mean like
five years or so. There yougo, Well again, folks, is
dot actor Sandra longish log It's lA n G E S l A G
and you can find her at UM S L dot eed U if you
want to look up more of herresearch and work. Professor, thank you
so much for taking the time.How thank you, Thank you everyone for
(22:14):
listening. Hey, make sure toshare, subscribe, or hit that I
like button. You know we likeit, maybe even love it. See
you next time.
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