Biological Love

Biological Basis of Love

The aim of this essay is to discuss and evaluate a more recent area of neuropsychology, which is the biological basis of attraction. The focus of the essay will be on how certain brain activities in regions of the brain are associated with feelings of attraction in an individual. These forms of attractions can be seen as types of love towards a potential mate and this essay will be targeted at defining what love is and the type of loves there are. The essay will then link these types of loves to neuropsychological research to find the connections between these types of feelings and brain activity. The research will then be evaluated on its validity and reliability to make a conclusion of attraction being based on these brain systems.
The first key to achieving an understanding of what love is on a biological basis is made through defining the meaning of love and how exactly it differs from liking someone. Rubin (1973) felt that liking and loving someone, were completely different systems, where liking was shown to be defined more as a respect, whilst love was also composed of attachment, caring and intimacy as well. Rubin developed two scales for this theory and the discriminative validity of this theory was measured from at least a male perspective of liking and loving a woman through these scales (Dermer & Pszczynski 1978), the results suggested that there was a significant difference between the two systems.
This however doesn’t entirely help us define what love is, considering there can be many types of love and it makes the idea of love very subjective. Sternberg (1998) agreed with the idea of many types of love and took an in-depth view of the type’s love that attracts us to an individual. Also similarly to Rubin (1973), Sternberg believed that attachment and intimacy were two of the main types of love as well as passionate love. These three together are said to form consummate love, but separately produce different kinds of

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