Passionate Love and Sexual Desire - Elaine Hatfield

7someone, there is less need to assess their character and personality in a negative way.Passion also produced increased activity in the brain areas associated with euphoria andreward, and decreased levels of activity in the areas associated with distress anddepression. Activity seemed to be restricted to foci in the medial insula and the anteriorcingulated cortex and, subcortically, in the caudate nucleus, and the putamen, allbilaterally. Deactivations were observed in the posterior cingulated gyrus and in theamygdala and were right-lateralized in the prefrontal, parietal, and middle temporalcortices.The conclusion?We conclude that human attachment employs a push-pull mechanism thatovercomes social distance by deactivating networks used for criticalsocial assessment and negative emotions, while it bonds individualsthrough the involvement of the reward circuitry, explaining the power oflove to motivate and exhilarate (Bartels & Zeki, 2004, p. 1155).The authors also found passionate love and sexual arousal to be tightly linked.Other psychologists who have studied the links between passionate love andsexual desire (using fMRI techniques) have found similar results. Fisher and hercolleagues (2003, 2004), for example, investigated the brain chemistry of men andwomen passionately in love (again using the PLS scale) and found that passionate lovemarkedly increased sexual motivation.In parallel with this research, a number of social psychologists, neurobiologists,and physiologists have begun to explore the neural and chemical substrates of passionate