Why do some types of love feel stronger and more intense? A new neuroscience-based study (Rinne et al., 2024) published on August 26 in Cerebral Cortex used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show how different types of love activate specific brain regions at varying intensities.

For this study, researchers at Aalto University in Finland measured how six types of love recruit different brain areas at various intensities when people in an fMRI focused their attention on feelings of love for the following things:

"Extending conceptually beyond interpersonal relations, we further included the category of nonhuman pets to probe the neural correlates of interspecies love and a nonsocial category of love for beautiful nature to compare the neural correlates of a frequently experienced type of nonsocial love with those of social love," the authors explain.

The fMRI neuroimages above were taken in real time and illuminate how each type of love activates slightly different brain regions depending on the object of someone's love and focused attention from moment to moment inside a functional magnetic resonance machine.

Of these six types of love, Rinne et al. found that parental love for one's child (or children) typically generated the most intense brain activity among people with kids. "In parental love, there was activation deep in the brain's reward system in the striatum area while imagining love, and this was not seen for any other kind of love," first author Pärttyli Rinne said in a news release.

Activation of the medial prefrontal cortex and precuneus observed........

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