Word: romanticizes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Now we were ready to gather our subjects, using word of mouth and the HAVE YOU JUST FALLEN MADLY IN LOVE? poster. Just and madly were the operative words. We sought only candidates who were so intensely in love that they could hardly eat or sleep, people whose romantic feelings...
At this point, I interviewed each candidate. My first question was always the same: "How long have you been in love?" My second question was the most important: "What percentage of the day and night do you think about your sweetheart?" Because obsessive thinking is a central ingredient of romantic...
We also found activity in other regions of the reward system, including areas of the septum and a brain region that becomes active when people eat chocolate. Chocolate can be addictive. I maintain that romantic love is addictive too.
Another striking result from our FMRI experiment concerned activity in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a central part of the reward circuitry of the brain. This result was what I was looking for. As you know, I had hypothesized that romantic love is associated with elevated levels of dopamine or...
All these data had a definite effect on me--they changed my understanding of romantic love. For many years I had regarded this wonderful experience as a constellation of related emotions that ranged from elation to despair. But psychologists distinguish between emotions and motivations--brain systems oriented around planning and...