Scientists have mapped where in the body people feel different types of love, such as romantic and parental ones, and how strongly they are experienced – an advance that sheds more light on the differences in human experience.
Philosophers have long distinguished between different types of love including ones like self-love, romantic love, and platonic love.
Meanwhile, psychologists and neuroscientists have looked to further understand the emotions as well as behavioral and nerve signal mechanisms in the body linked to romantic love and parental love.
However, it remains unclear if and how the models developed by philosophers are related to actual experiences of love, as well as the extent to which they are merely nominal creations.
In the new study, published recently in the journal Philosophical Psychology, researchers attempted to distinguish between 27 different types of love by assessing how they are experienced as embodied feelings, and how these experiences are related to one another.
“It was noteworthy, though not very surprising, that the types of love associated with close relationships are similar and are the most strongly experienced,” study co-author Parttyli Rinne from Aalto University said.
The study surveyed hundreds of participants online about how they experienced 27 different types of love, such as romantic love, sexual love, parental love, and love for friends, strangers, nature, God, or themself.
Participants were asked where they felt the different types of love in their bodies, and how intense the feeling was physically and mentally.
Researchers also asked about how the participants felt the different types of love physically and mentally, how pleasant the feeling was, and how it was associated with touch.
Participants were also asked to rate the closeness of the types of love they felt.
“Our study provides the first mapping of embodied experiences associated with different types of love,” the authors wrote in the study.
The findings suggest that the different types of love form a continuum from weaker to stronger.
“We suggest that ‘love’ may be viewed theoretically as an open, ‘fuzzy’, yet continuous experience category of potentially inexhaustible subtypes, held together by varying degrees of similarity of positively valenced emotional feeling,” the study noted.
While all the types were felt strongly in the head, researchers say they differed throughout the rest of the body.
Some types of love were felt spread only to the chest, while others were felt all over, they say.
But the strongest forms of love, according to the study, were felt most widely throughout the body.
The types of love that are particularly close to each other are those that have a sexual or romantic dimension, researchers say.
They also found that the more strongly a type of love was felt in the body, the more strongly it’s felt in the mind, and the more pleasant it was reported to be.
“When we move from more strongly experienced types of love to less strongly experienced types, the sensations in the chest area become weaker. It may be that, for example, love for strangers or wisdom is associated with a cognitive process,” Dr Rinne said.
“It may also be that there are pleasant sensations in the head area. This is something that should be investigated further,” he added.
However, the study points there may also be cultural differences among demographics.
“If the same study were done in a highly religious community, love for God might be the most strongly experienced love of all. Similarly, if the subjects were parents in a relationship, as in our ongoing brain study project, love for children could be the strongest type of love,” Dr Rinne said.
