How we feel a whole lot of loves

Though most of us would say that we love something — a romantic partner, a pet, or even work — there's little academic consensus on what 'love' means and how it feels. 

Philosophers have long distinguished between many types of love; self-love, the love of a friend, and romantic love, to name just a few. Despite millennia of philosophical exploration on the experience, however, psychologists and neuroscientists have tended to focus on just two kinds: romantic love and parental love. So, to what extent broader models of love proposed by philosophers relate to people's actual experiences has not been clear. 

Now, new work by Pärttyli Rinne and his colleagues at Aalto University, Finland, helps to plug this gap. In their paper in Philosophical Psychology, the team reports the first systematic investigation of how people feel different forms of love in their body. Expanding beyond romantic and parental love, this work highlights the many different types of love humans are capable of, and suggests that love types sit on a continuum of strength of emotional feeling. 

The team used the emBODY tool, which has previously been used for research on other emotions. In the first experiment, 128 participants used a computer mouse to 'paint' on a blank silhouette of a body where, and how strongly, they felt each of the 27 different types of love that are in the Finnish language. (The number of mouse clicks on a given point on the body indicated the strength of the sensations in that region.) These types include sexual love, passionate love, self-love, love for one's siblings, love for the countryside, love of beauty, love for life, and 'true' love. 

The results revealed some overlap in where some of these types of love were felt. The head area was highlighted for all types of love, and the chest area was also implicated in most. But there were also some clear differences. For example, the genital area was highlighted for sexual love, while passionate love, a love for life and true love were felt most extensively, with sensations reported across the whole body. Some love types, including a love of wisdom and love of strangers, were restricted to only the head. 

The team suspects that when the chest region was highlighted, this related to perceptions of changes in heart rate and breathing. When the head was highlighted, they believe that this might have related to specific facial expressions — or been because participants associated some types of love, such as a love of wisdom and morality, with the brain.

The team found clear differences in the strength of bodily sensations associated with different types of love. Passionate love and true love were reported to have the most intense sensations. Other types were felt less strongly, with moral love and practical love coming in as the weakest. 

In a second experiment, participants saw the name of each love type in turn on a screen. Using a slider, they responded to various questions such as how strongly they felt each type of love in their body, how strongly they felt it in their mind, how good that type of love felt, and how strongly they associated it with bodily touch.  

The researchers found strong links between the intensities on each of these dimensions. So, for example, love types related to sexuality were reported to have the strongest bodily feelings, while also feeling great, being highly related to bodily touch, and being strongly felt in the mind. Some other forms of love, including a love for strangers and a love of wisdom, had relatively low scores on all these dimensions. 

In a third experiment, the 27 Finnish love words were arranged in a random order on the left side of a screen. The participants had to drag them across the screen, re-arranging them so that types of love that felt most similar were closest to each other. This exercise revealed two broad clusters of love types, which the team termed 'interpersonal love' (where the love is felt for a person) and 'love for ideas and non-human animals'. 

Overall, the work suggests that types of love with a clear biological relevance — romantic, sexual, and parental love — are the most strongly felt, with types of love for other people (such as neighbours) and love for a concept or an abstract entity being weaker. The team suggests that it's possible that some of these variations relate to quantifiable neural and hormonal differences in love for a child versus love for a stranger, for example, but further work is needed to explore this. 

More work will also be needed on other groups of people. The participants in this study were mostly young, mostly female, and all Finnish. Bodily experiences of love may be different for those of other ages and cultures. For now, though, these findings do support the idea, long popular in philosophy, that we feel many types of love.  

Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2023.225246