What is Love? The Science Behind Lust, Attraction, and Attachment

ah feel that Rush of Serotonin [Music] all right guys welcome to psych explained in this video we're going to dive into the psychology of Love or more specifically three distinct behaviors behind mating and reproduction what we call lust attraction and attachment and these three distinct behaviors are based on the research of anthropologist Helen Fisher who studied all species on the planet and what is happening in the brain when they're reproducing or mating or maybe falling in love with each other now you notice on the board I had this kind of long road here right and that's because I'm going to talk about each of these distinct behaviors as if they occur in a specific order right we kind of are sexually aroused by somebody we want to form a relationship with them and then we become attached to them and we want to form a long-term relationship but understand everybody's different not everybody goes through the same sequence in order or ghost them at all right you might have a one night stand with somebody but not actually want to you know form a relationship with them on the other hand you might be emotionally involved with somebody but not be sexually attracted to them right so just take it with a grain of salt of this idea of going in order everybody is different all right let's start with the first one what do we mean by lust well what do all species on the planet have in common we all need to pass on our genes so here's what we mean by lust what we're talking about is kind of our innate need of sexual gratification right this is our sex drive right what do we need to do pass on our genes right make sure our species continues to survive and another psych word you might use is libido and libido comes from the Latin word meaning desire right so what do these kind of all have in common what we're talking about is the idea that we need to what pass on are what our genes okay so this is the idea of getting up going on a Friday night Saturday night going to the bar do what you need to do because we want to make sure we find as many mates as possible right we're thinking about this from an evolutionary standpoint right I know you're not going to a bar thing and like I need to pass in my jeans to everybody but that's the kind of mentality you need to have right so that's what we really mean by lust now what factors affect us right why is some people you know very sexually motivated and other people are not well there's a lot of different reasons right we think about cultural reasons right it could be things like your parents think about your upbringing right some of us were raised and very conservative houses right where sex was very taboo don't talk about it others much more liberal and think about your friends right are you friends sexually active are they talking about this stuff or is it more kind of uh you know down below the surface and even things like the media right what you're exposed to on TV and on social media right all that plays a role in terms of our lust and our sex drive what about psychological what about our thoughts right involved in sex drive well a lot of things can play a role it could be things like uh stress where I think about how stress might affect uh your drive and desire to pursue uh somebody else or maybe even trauma right I know I'm talking about childhood a lot but a lot of this plays a role in your current present-day state of whether you're single or married or attached to another person or even maybe your thoughts about yourself right like thoughts about your body image right all these play a role in your sex drive and we're going to focus on really today in this video is the last one which is biological right all these physiological mechanisms involved in lust and our sex drive whether it's how old you are right we know as we get older we lose specific hormones and our our sex drive kind of decreases everything from genes right genetics right always plays a role and things we'll talk about today like hormones right how much like the level of hormones in our body so understand what comes to us there's a variety of factors that play a role but what are we going to focus on let's focus on the biological so let me ask you this can you think about part of the brain that really regulates the whole sex drive well if you're thinking in your head oh it must be the hypothalamus you are correct okay and the hypothalamus hypo means below is this structure right there and the hypothalamus really controls homeostasis right if you're hungry you eat if you're thirsty you drink if you sleep you sleep it kind of regulates the whole body another purpose it controls our sex drive so how does it do that well let's bring it down together okay the first thing we have and I'm going to write the word hypothalamus down here is when does the hypothalamus really start communicating with the body when it comes to sex well if you're thinking puberty you're right right this went all the Cascade of hormone start to kind of go down our body and and make changes right so what does hypothalamus do well the hypothalamus is going to communicate with a specific structure right here this kind of two lobes called the pituitary gland this is the master gland right think of you know the hypothalamus is the CEO and the pituitary gland is like second to command and during this process of puberty the pituitary gland is going to communicate with really two gonads to sexual organs the testes in males testes and the ovaries in females okay and why is it doing that because it's going to release specific hormones to kind of boost this loss in sex drive because we need to pass on our genes in a testy specifically we'll say t for testosterone and what about the ovaries the ovaries are going to release we call estrogen okay and these are the two specific sex hormones testosterone and estrogen and even in females testosterone is key okay you can have an animal that's been castrated and you boost them with testosterone and all of a sudden the sex drive goes up so even though estrogen is important testosterone is the main thing here all right so this is what we mean by lust this passing on our genes this libido this desire and craving for sexual intercourse all right what's next let's say you had we'll just say for our purpose of this video right this is our one night stand this is being sexually intimate with somebody we decide you know this is the person that I want to be with right I'm attracted to them I'm put all my resources together into this one person and this is what Helen Fisher refers to as attraction right this is what we mean by kind of this emotional Union right emotional Union with somebody uh this feeling of you know romantic love another name for uh attraction right and from an evolutionary standpoint essentially what you're doing at least in the male's perspective is you're investing all of your resources right into one single person right in lust you're investing your resources in everybody right just anywhere somebody will take me but here we're investing all of our energy into one specific mate right now before we get into kind of the the brain circuitry of Attraction here's a big question why are we attracted to somebody in the first place right what are the kind of The evolutionary reasons why we find this person attractive but not this person and we can divide this into really two big things we have conscious in other words you know why you're attracted to them you can kind of pinpoint it and verbalize it another is subconscious right below conscious awareness what I'm interested in is the subconscious right that's the stuff like you don't know why you're attracted to them but you are but let's start with the conscious attraction and by the way I have this for for visual cues and oh factory cues and auditory cues right all these cues affecting um attraction the first one uh conscious is probably the most obvious one for all species and that is we'll say physical attraction right you have to be physically attracted to the person um to you know form a relationship with them right and physical attraction comes in a lot of different forms right it could be symmetry of the face right we know that we might have heard that before we're like you put your hand here and this side must match this side the more symmetrical right a face tends to be more attractive uh it could even be things like you know waste to hip ratio I mean these things are so specific research can find what makes somebody attractive to even a male right the shape of our jaw right or our chest right all these play a role so why is that why is physical traction so important to human beings well it's because the health of a person okay the physical you know the what their skin looks like and you know the shape of their jaw and the shape of their chest right tells us at least from an evolutionary's perspective about their fertility right are you able to have a baby right are you youthful right are you able to pass on my genes right so physical attractiveness is really about the fertility the passing on my genes are you able to have a baby um compared to other things now it's important to know we'll add some psychology here why is physical attraction so important uh well it's because I'll have another arrow here it's because when somebody's physical attractive we also think that they're good at other things okay in fact I'll erase that here and we call this in Psychology the halo effect in other words if you're physically attractive we also think you're funny and uh you know you you have a good family and you have a good personality right that's a cognitive error but we tend to think of something physically attractive you have all their good qualities as well another trait that would be a conscious awareness is we'll call proximity right and we mean by proximity Is closeness right how close you are to the person right this is why relationships often start in a classroom or in a workplace because you see the person over and over and over again and this relates to let's add more psychology here this relates to another term in Psychology called the mirror you know where I'm going this the mirror exposure effect which tells us that the more you see somebody okay the more we tend to desire them and like them right so it's not just about being close to them we tend to prefer them because we see them all the time right it's like hearing a song on the radio over and over again eventually like it's not a bad song or seeing the same commercial over and over again when you see it more often we tend to like and desire them right so here are some kind of conscious reasons we might be uh close also similarities right things you have in common all right so let's talk about these subconscious right the things below the surface of why we might be attracted to somebody but really have no conscious awareness now notice I have a shirt because a lot of these studies deal with olfactory cues so in these studies males or females wear shirts they won't put on cologne they will put won't put on other scents they'll just wear the shirt in their natural odor their pheromones will kind of penetrate the shirt and they'll stuff the shirt put them in a jar and they'll have males of females smell the shirts later on why are these studies really important this is really cool well some of these studies show that males and females or at least in this study um females can smell genetic differences okay so what do I mean by that small genetic differences in this study they had males wear shirts put them in a jar and then women rated the attractness of those shirts and the ones that are more attractive had bigger differences in genetics right in other words the more different genetics you are the more likely you are to fight off diseases your different immune systems you don't want similar genes right that would be like incest so women can actually smell differences uh just from those pheromones which is really cool in another study uh dealing with men is that men can smell pre-ovulation ovulation right so what does that mean it means that when males are asked to rate the attractiveness of women based on the shirts they rated the women who are about to ovulate more attractive than the women who are not ovulating right ovulating is the release of an egg where a woman can be impregnated right the fur egg can be fertilized so these are really interesting studies that deal with smell and I'll put these in the description comment box um below in other studies you might have auditory cues right there's some studies to show that the voice of a person can signal uh attraction so for example a deeper voice now everybody's going to start talking deeper in videos a deeper voice can signal to females an increase in testosterone right and if I have increased testosterone it means that I'm more fertile right I'm more likely to uh you know have better genes right so everybody's going to start talking deep like this so these are kind of these subtle more subconscious cues there's even subconscious cues of taste and kissing and passing a testosterone but these are the big ones all right so now that we know what makes somebody attractive from an evolutionary perspective what's actually happening in the brain of somebody who's in this kind of honeymoon phase right where they fall in love with somebody and they can't sleep and they have this kind of just desire in this craving and emotional bond towards somebody a lot of this is based on fmri studies from Fisher and our colleagues when you put people in fmri machines you ask them to imagine somebody that they love romantically right compared to a dog or their parent they find us at different areas of the brain light up when you're in romantic love compared to other types of Love specifically an area of the brain called and this is a big one right together the ventral what is it called the ventral tegmental area mental gotta make sure I spell the right area okay also known as the VTA okay and where would we find the VTA well the VTA is going to be right in the midbrain okay right in the midbrain right then the brain stem era okay and why is this area important is because in this era you have an abundance of what's called dopa menergic neurons okay so what does that mean it means you have all these neurons that are specifically geared towards pumping out all this dopamine what does dopamine do is that feel good kind of motivator pursuit of all things pleasurable right so you have all this kind of dopaminergic neurons and this is going to communicate with a few structures it's going to communicate with this big structure here okay what is the structure this is our our nucleus accumbens okay and why is this support this structure important well this structure is all pleasure pleasure pleasure right anything you eat cake you are scrolling in social media you're having sex anything that is pleasurable you're going to have kind of all these dopamine receptors touching on the nucleus accumbens okay the other thing to think about this area and this kind of important is this is where drug addiction typically occurs right you have all this kind of uh activation for addiction which tells us that love is kind of like an addiction and the other area uh that all these kind of Domine pathway is going to go to is we call the prefrontal prefrontal cortex okay and where we're going to find the prefrontal cortex PFC well that's going to be right in front prefrontal cortex okay right in the front of the brain right right behind the forehead and that's involved in planning and decision making right and we'll talk about how that plays a role here as well all right so what's actually happening in the brain during attraction well a couple things to consider one is novelty when you start to like somebody you think about them all the time right and that's because it's novel novel means new and this is really associated with this kind of boost of dopamine right you know this boosted dope mean anytime something's new it feels good you want them to see them again and again and again you have this kind of like separation anxiety so novelty is Big with attraction you also have this Euphoria feeling right instead of dopamine this is typically associated with with a neurotransmitter called what nor epinephrine what is called nor epinephrine and the reason this is important because a lot of times when people fall in love with each other in the honeymoon phase what happens well you can't sleep right you're insomnia uh you can't eat right loss of appetite all these different behaviors occur when you fall in love right in the honeymoon attraction phase and all that's related to kind of this this you know fight or flight stress hormone that feels energy and Euphoria and heartbeat that's all part of that as well now here's what's not great rumination what do I mean that rumination means fixation you're fixated right you think about this person all the time you can't get this person out of your head and a lot of times it's related to a decrease in a specific neurotransmitter can you think about what it is we call serotonin okay and when would you also see he's a serotonin when somebody suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder so does that tell you being loved is almost like having a OCD you can't eat you can't sleep you're ruminating about this person you're fixated on them you can't get them out of your head and you know during a breakup that rumination is going to kick in even more right that obsessiveness the last thing is we have deactivation areas they're specific areas of the brain that stop working really well when we're in that attraction phase which area specifically we just talked about over here the pre-frontal cortex okay so why is that important we tend to make not good decisions when we are in love with somebody right we're falling in love or you know in that honeymoon phase right so this area I'll use a different marker doesn't work very well right in other words we make bad decisions we do things we normally wouldn't do right you might look back years later and be like I can't believe I did that I can't believe he she made me do that whatever it was right so we're not making good decisions in this area another area of the brain that's kind of deactivated is the amygdala amygdala this is my favorite structure right the part of the brain where's my amygdala there it is I'm going to circle it right there right the amygdala right next to the hippocampus involved in strong emotions and fear and aggression right in other words we're able to overlook a lot of bad things and have those really strong emotions when we're in the attraction phase right things that would normally make us fear Fuller or make us you know emotional we we put back right because we only look at the positive things right I can Overlook the bad because you know I really want to be with this person right so there we go there's kind of our attraction face so we've kind of hooked up with somebody uh we want a relationship with them and years down the road we'll just say years down the road no pun intended we want to find uh we want to be with them attach them and hopefully be with them forever and this phase is what we call attachment and this is the long term commitment okay I want to be with this person forever right and they create you know they give me that feeling of what of comfort right of comfort and calm right uh I have reduction in cortisol right my stress hormone I don't feel stress anymore right this is kind of the attachment phase another word for this phase uh this is the work of Robert sterberg the theories of love might call this phase the companionate love like you're my companion right don't leave me I love you right companion love okay but here's some really big questions to think about right is why are we monogamous in the first place by the way by monogamy what I'm saying is uh and this is a very evolutionary term para bonding right that we decide to mate with one female or female mates with one male and we stay together for life raising our Offspring right instead of being polygamous like most beasts on the planet in fact what percent here's a question for you what percentage of mammals on the planet do you think are monogamous that is only find one mate and they have one kid and they stay with them their whole lives it's not a lot right research shows maybe you know five to ten percent that's it five to ten percent of species on the planet are monogamous that means 90 of species go mate to mate and they even though they might be in a tribe they mate with each other so this is a very special thing and why is that from an evolution perspective what are the advantages well there are a couple advantages um one advantage of being monogamous is really the safety and survival survival of offspring okay in other words if the male is around right he could protect his child from other Predators looking to infiltrate My Tribe right and kill my Offspring so it's really about kind of safety that I'm going to be there for my child and if I'm there for my child they can grow into an adult and pass on their genes right as homo sapias we have giant brains it takes us a long time to go from you know baby to adults so a father has to be there or a partner has to be there for a long time from The evolutionary perspective so survival of our offspring another reason is just it's easier right it's much easier to sit down and be with one mate than fight all the time for a mate right I'm just going to be with you we're going to raise our kid I'm not going to fight and try to die to find different people is just easier and safer and another theory is often called like the spacing effect Theory and this is the idea that uh females would need to space out to get more food right you need more food and you spread out and that Force males to also spread out and then you have just everybody kind of in their own area nobody came in contact with each other everybody spread out in their own tribe easier safer survival of Offspring okay so what is actually happening in the brain uh when it comes to attachment well a lot of the research comes from this little guy right here what is that a Prairieville and you'll find prayerfuls mostly in North America and why is a prayerful important well I said only five to ten percent of animals mammals are monogamous can you name one if you think of prayer Bowl you're also on it right so if we study species that are also monogamous why what is it about them right what's happening in their brains and when you dive into their brains okay you find very interesting things okay what do we find well first let's label a couple structures we have the hypothalamus right this is our maze structure right here right talking to pituitary gland releases two specific hormones that are related to pair bonding do you know what those are let's think about them together one of them and we see these uh in Prairie moles is what we call oxytocin okay oxytocin also called the cuddle hormone okay and this hormone we find of course in humans as well and oxytocin is released during bonding oxytocin is released during um uh during childbirth right because you want to bond with your child it's released during orgasm right to kind of also form that bond with another human being another main one we'll put down here is what's called Vaso precin okay and vasopressin is also this hormone involved in cuddling and bonding and that's the one we'll find right deep within the brain of our little prayer of all friends okay so there's kind of hormonal uh things going on now there's also genetics right we'll write genetics here because you can manipulate the genes of these animals and also impact if they're going to be monogamous or polygamous so genetics will also play a role all right guys thanks for watching I really hope you took something away don't forget to like the video subscribe I'll see you next time

Channel: Psych Explained

Views: 7,527

Keywords: Psychology, Love, Lust, Attraction, Oxytocin, Prairie voles, Helen fisher, Desire, Dopamine, Sex drive, Libido, Halo effect, Proximity, Mere exposure effect, Vasopressin, Robert Sternberg, Companionate love, Romantic love, Science of love, Psychology, Love, Lust, Attraction, Oxytocin, Prairie voles, Helen fisher, Desire, Dopamine, Sex drive, Libido, Halo effect, Proximity, Mere exposure effect, Vasopressin, Robert Sternberg, Companionate love, Romantic love, Science of love

Id: 9kaZ79MQWrM

Length: 23min 51sec (1431 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 13 2023