Refuting Six Misconceptions about Romantic Love.

Scientific research on romantic love has been relatively sparse but is becoming more prevalent, as it should. Unfortunately, several misconceptions about romantic love are becoming entrenched in the popular media and/or the scientific community, which hampers progress. Therefore, I refute six misconceptions about romantic love in this article. I explain why (1) romantic love is not necessarily dyadic, social, or interpersonal, (2) love is not an emotion, (3) romantic love does not just have positive effects, (4) romantic love is not uncontrollable, (5) there is no dedicated love brain region, neurotransmitter, or hormone, and (6) pharmacological manipulation of romantic love is not near. To increase progress in our scientific understanding of romantic love, I recommend that we study the intrapersonal aspects of romantic love including the intensity of love, that we focus our research questions and designs using a component process model of romantic love, and that we distinguish hypotheses and suggestions from empirical findings when citing previous work.

Factors that contribute to an inability to remember an important aspect of a traumatic event.

Dissociative amnesia is controversial. We tested other factors that could contribute to an inability to remember an important aspect of a traumatic event: how traumatic the event was, organic amnesia, dissociative state, childhood amnesia, expression suppression, sleep disturbance, repeated experiences, and ordinary forgetting. Trauma survivors who reported an inability to remember an important aspect of a traumatic event rated the event as traumatic as trauma survivors who reported no such inability to remember. Moreover, all cases of an inability to remember an important aspect of the traumatic event could be explained by at least one factor other than dissociative amnesia. These findings are contrary to dissociative amnesia. Compared to participants who reported no inability to remember an important aspect of the traumatic event, participants who did report an inability to remember were more likely to (1) have felt disconnected from their body during the traumatic event, which may have altered memory encoding, (2) have experienced sleep problems in the year after the traumatic event, which may have reduced memory consolidation, and (3) have experienced the traumatic event repeatedly, which may have led to less detailed memories. These findings have implications for the inclusion of dissociative amnesia in the DSM.

Electrophysiological Correlates of Romantic Love: A Review of EEG and ERP Studies with Beloved-Related Stimuli.

Science is starting to unravel the neural basis of romantic love. The goal of this literature review was to identify and interpret the electrophysiological correlates of romantic love. Electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potential (ERP) studies with a design that elicits romantic love feelings were included. The methods of previous EEG studies are too heterogeneous to draw conclusions. Multiple ERP studies, however, have shown that beloved stimuli elicit an enhanced late positive potential (LPP/P3/P300), which is not due to familiarity, positive valence, or objective beauty. This effect occurs in Western and Eastern cultures and for pictorial and verbal information, and results from bottom-up rather than top-down factors. Studies have also shown that beloved stimuli elicit an early posterior negativity (EPN), which also does not seem to be due to familiarity or positive valence. Data on earlier ERP components (P1, N1, P2, N170/VPP, N2) is scarce and mixed. Of course, the enhanced LPP and EPN are not specific to romantic love. Instead, they suggest that the beloved captures early attention, within 200-300 ms after stimulus onset that is relatively resource-independent, and subsequently receives sustained motivated attention. Future research would benefit from employing cognitive tasks and testing participants who are in love regardless of relationship status.

A Preliminary Study on Up-regulation of Sexual Desire for a Long-term Partner.

BACKGROUND: Declining sexual desire over the course of a relationship may cause distress. Because sexual desire partly depends on who the (imagined) sexual partner is, this study focuses on increasing sexual desire for the long-term partner specifically. AIM: This study examined 3 regulation strategies: (i) positive reappraisal of the partner, (ii) reappraisal of sexual desire decline, and (iii) sexual imagery about the partner. We tested whether these 3 strategies increased (i) sexual desire for the partner, (ii) motivated attention for the partner, as indicated by the late positive potential (LPP) amplitude, and (iii) infatuation, attachment, and relationship satisfaction. METHODS: Twenty-five young adults (6 men) who were in a long-term relationship performed the regulation strategies and no regulation before passively viewing a picture of their partner. OUTCOMES: The LPP amplitude was measured during the partner picture. After each strategy, participants rated their sexual desire, infatuation, attachment, and relationship satisfaction. RESULTS: Participants felt more sexual desire for and more infatuated with their partner after sexual imagery about the partner than after no regulation. Participants also felt more attached to their partner after positive reappraisal of the partner than after no regulation. There was no evidence that any of the strategies influenced relationship satisfaction or motivated attention. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: Sexual imagery about the partner is a simple strategy that people can use without involving the partner to increase sexual desire for (and infatuation with) their long-term partner. STRENGTHS & LIMITATIONS: One of the strengths of the current study is the experimental manipulation of strategy use within participants, which allows for conclusions of causality. The main limitation is the small, inclusive convenience sample. This study had good power to detect medium effects but was underpowered to detect small effects. Participants were mostly young adult women in relatively short long-term relationships. Gender differences in the effectiveness of the 3 strategies were not hypothesized or tested. CONCLUSION: Sexual imagery about the partner increases sexual desire for (and infatuation with) the partner. Langeslag SJE, Davis LL. A Preliminary Study on Up-regulation of Sexual Desire for a Long-term Partner. J Sex Med 2022;19:872-878.

The effect of fearful expressions on recognition memory for faces: Behavioral and electrophysiological data.

Facial expressions affect memory for face identity. We tested how fearful expressions modulate recognition memory for faces. In two studies, participants completed a continuous recognition task with fearful and neutral faces while their electroencephalogram was recorded. Each face stimulus was presented twice and participants were instructed to indicate whether it was presented for the first ('new') or second time ('old'). The false alarm rate was higher for fearful than neutral faces, which is opposite to the emotion enhancement effect on memory but in line with the liberal response bias for emotional information. There was no evidence of emotional modulation of the N400 old/new effect, which suggests that the sense of familiarity was not affected by fearful facial expressions. The LPC old/new effect, however, was modulated by facial expression, as it was absent for fearful faces because of a greater positivity in response to new fearful than new neutral faces. This LPC old/new effect finding may reflect that the emotional salience of fearful new faces is mistaken for a sense of recollection, resulting in an increased false alarm rate. In short, people seem more likely to (mistakenly) think that they have encountered a person before when the person looks scared compared to non-emotional, which has relevance for daily life and forensic situations such as police lineups.

Cognitive control in romantic love: the roles of infatuation and attachment in interference and adaptive cognitive control.

Besides physiological, behavioural, and affective effects, romantic love also has cognitive effects. In this study, we tested (1) whether individual differences in infatuation and/or attachment level predict impaired interference control even in the absence of a love booster procedure, and (2) whether individual differences in attachment level predict reduced adaptive cognitive control as measured by conflict adaptation and post-error slowing. Eighty-three young adults who had recently fallen in love completed a Stroop-like task, which yielded reliable indices of interference control (i.e. the interference effect) and adaptive cognitive control (i.e. conflict adaptation and post-error slowing). We did not observe the predicted negative association between infatuation or attachment level and interference control. It might be that reduced interference control with love only happens when people are actively thinking about their beloved. In addition, we observed only weak evidence for the prediction that attachment level is associated with reduced conflict adaption. The results did show, however, that attachment level is associated with less post-error slowing, which is in line with the notion that attachment to a romantic partner buffers against aversive events. Our findings suggest that attachment is associated with reduced adaptive cognitive control, which could have implications in everyday life.

Preferential processing of task-irrelevant beloved-related information and task performance: Two event-related potential studies.

People who are in love have better attention for beloved-related information, but report having trouble focusing on other tasks, such as (home)work. So, romantic love can both improve and hurt cognition. Emotional information is preferentially processed, which improves task performance when the information is task-relevant, but hurts task performance when it is task-irrelevant. Because beloved-related information is highly emotional, the effects of romantic love on cognition may resemble these effects of emotion on cognition. We examined whether beloved-related information is preferentially processed even when it is task-irrelevant and whether this hurts task performance. In two event-related potential studies, participants who had recently fallen in love performed a visuospatial short-term memory task. Task-irrelevant beloved, friend, and stranger faces were presented during maintenance (Study 1), or encoding (Study 2). The Early Posterior Negativity (EPN) reflecting early automatic attentional capturing and the Late Positive Potential (LPP) reflecting sustained motivated attention were largest for beloved pictures. Thus, beloved pictures are preferentially processed even when they are task-irrelevant. Task performance and reaction times did not differ between beloved, friend, and stranger conditions. Nevertheless, self-reported obsessive thinking about the beloved tended to correlate negatively with task performance, and positively with reaction times, across conditions. So, although task-irrelevant beloved-related information does not impact task performance, more obsessive thinking about the beloved might relate to poorer and slower overall task performance. More research is needed to clarify why people experience trouble focusing on beloved-unrelated tasks and how this negative effect of love on cognition could be reduced.

Romantic love and attention: Early and late event-related potentials.

The beloved likely attracts attention. We tested whether the beloved captures early automatic attention, as indicated by an early posterior negativity (EPN) in a typical rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task, while replicating previous findings that the beloved receives sustained motivated attention, as indicated by an enhanced late positive potential (LPP) in a standard passive viewing task. Participants viewed beloved, friend, and stranger pictures in RSVP and standard passive viewing tasks. Participants felt most pleasant and aroused while viewing beloved pictures. In the RSVP task, there was a left lateral parietal EPN for the beloved (vs. friend and stranger) between 225 and 300 ms. In the standard passive viewing task, the midline centroparietal LPP between 400 and 1000 ms was larger in response to the beloved than friend and stranger. So, the beloved captures early automatic attention as well as sustained motivated attention, likely because they are evolutionarily significant.

Perceived ability to regulate love.

Research has shown that romantic love can be regulated. We investigated perceptions about love regulation, because these perceptions may impact mental health and influence love regulation application. Two-hundred eighty-six participants completed a series of items online via Qualtrics that assessed perceived ability to up- and down-regulate, exaggerate and suppress the expression of, and start and stop different love types. We also tested individual differences in perceived love regulation ability. Participants thought that they could up- but not down-regulate love in general and that they could up-regulate love in general more than down-regulate it. Participants thought that they could up-regulate infatuation less than attachment and sexual desire. Participants also thought that they could exaggerate and suppress expressions of infatuation, attachment, and sexual desire, but that they could not start and stop infatuation and attachment, or start sexual desire. The more participants habitually used cognitive reappraisal, the more they thought that they could up- and down-regulate infatuation and attachment and up-regulate sexual desire. The more participants were infatuated with their beloved, the more they thought that they could up- but not down-regulate infatuation, attachment, and sexual desire. Finally, participants thought that they could up- and down-regulate happiness more than infatuation These findings are a first step toward the development of psychoeducation techniques to correct inaccurate love regulation perceptions, which may improve mental health and love regulation in daily life.

The effect of mouth opening in emotional faces on subjective experience and the early posterior negativity amplitude.

Previous studies have examined the role of the eye region in emotional expressions, but the mouth region is understudied. The main goal of this study was to examine how mouth opening in emotional faces affects subjective experience and early automatic attentional capture, as measured by the early posterior negativity (EPN) amplitude. Participants in two studies viewed angry, happy, and neutral faces with mouths open and closed while their electroencephalogram was recorded. Afterwards, participants indicated how unpleasant-pleasant (i.e., valence) and calming-arousing (i.e., arousal) each face made them feel. Angry and happy faces (and neutral faces to a lesser extent) with an open vs. closed mouth made observers feel more extreme valence and arousal. In addition, there generally was an EPN for angry and happy faces (and neutral faces to a lesser extent) with open vs. closed mouths, which suggests that emotional expressions with an open mouth capture early automatic attention more than expressions with a closed mouth. Finally, the effects of mouth opening were somewhat modulated by face gender, but not by observer gender. The current findings contribute to our knowledge of facial expressions and social interaction, but also have relevance for the growing fields of social robotics and digital animation.

Effects of organization and disorganization on pleasantness, calmness, and the frontal negativity in the event-related potential.

A preference for organization is associated with several disorders, but is widespread in the general population as well. It remains unclear whether organization and various degrees of disorganization elicit pleasant or unpleasant feelings (i.e., valence), calming or arousing feelings (i.e., arousal), and a frontal negativity in the event-related potential (ERP) related to cognitive control. This study tested how organization, slight disorganization, and total disorganization affect valence, arousal, and the frontal negativity. Participants passively viewed organized, slightly disorganized, totally disorganized, and control pictures while their electroencephalogram was recorded. They also rated the valence and arousal elicited by each picture and completed questionnaires assessing desire for order and organization behavior. Organized pictures made participants feel most pleasant, control pictures made participants feel less pleasant, slightly disorganized pictures made participants feel even less pleasant, and totally disorganized pictures made participants feel least pleasant. There were no significant effects on arousal. Totally disorganized pictures elicited a frontal negativity in the ERP between 200-2000 ms after stimulus onset, which might reflect inhibition of rearranging behavior. Individual differences in desire for order and organization behavior did not correlate with valence, arousal, or the frontal negativity. The current study design and findings could be a starting point for examining the differences between adaptive and maladaptive preferences for organization and aversions to disorganization.

Cognitive reappraisal of snake and spider pictures: An event-related potentials study.

Fear of snakes and spiders are common animal phobias. Emotion regulation can change the response to emotional stimuli, including snakes and spiders. It is well known that emotion regulation modulates the late positive potential (LPP), which reflects sustained motivated attention. However, research concerning the effect of emotion regulation on the early posterior negativity (EPN), which reflects early selective attention, is scarce. The present research question was whether the EPN and LPP amplitudes are modulated by regulation of emotional responses to snake and spider stimuli. Emotion up- and down-regulation were expected to enhance and reduce the LPP amplitude, respectively, but emotion regulation was not expected to modulate the EPN amplitude. Female participants passively viewed snake, spider, and bird pictures, and up- and down-regulated their emotional responses to the snake and spider pictures using self-focused reappraisal, while their electroencephalogram was recorded. There were EPNs for snakes and spiders vs. birds, as well as for snakes vs. spiders. The LPP amplitude tended to be enhanced for snakes and spiders compared to birds. Most importantly, the LPP amplitude was larger in the up-regulate than in the down-regulate condition for both snakes and spiders, but there was no evidence that the EPN amplitude was modulated by emotion regulation. This suggests that emotion regulation modulated sustained motivated attention, but not early selective attention, to snakes and spiders. The findings are in line with the notion that the emotional modulation of the EPN is more automatic than the emotional modulation of the LPP.

Down-regulation of love feelings after a romantic break-up: Self-report and electrophysiological data.

Because remaining love feelings for an ex-partner are negatively associated with recovery from a romantic break-up, it may be helpful to decrease those love feelings. Love regulation is the use of behavioral or cognitive strategies to change the intensity of current feelings of romantic love. This study evaluated three regulation strategies: (1) negative reappraisal of the ex-partner, (2) reappraisal of love feelings, and (3) distraction. It was tested how these regulation strategies change love feelings for the ex-partner, valence of affect, and motivated attention for the ex-partner. Participants who were upset about a romantic break-up performed these regulation strategies before passively viewing a picture of their ex-partner, during which their electroencephalogram was recorded. Negative reappraisal decreased love feelings and made participants feel more unpleasant. Love reappraisal did not change how in love or pleasant/unpleasant participants felt. Distraction did not change love feelings but made participants feel more pleasant. This suggests that in the context of a romantic break-up, negative reappraisal is an effective love down-regulation strategy, whereas distraction is an effective positive emotion up-regulation strategy. Furthermore, all three strategies decreased motivated attention for the ex-partner, as indicated by a reduced amplitude of the late positive potential. This reduced motivated attention for the ex-partner could make it easier to deal with encounters of (reminders of) the ex-partner. Love regulation is a promising phenomenon with important everyday life and clinical implications. (PsycINFO Database Record

Early visual processing of snakes and angry faces: An ERP study.

Snakes and angry faces are common fear stimuli and both elicit an Early Posterior Negativity (EPN) in the event-related potential, which indicates that they capture early automatic visual attention. But because snakes have been a predatory threat for primates since long before communication through facial expressions evolved, we tested the hypothesis that the EPN for snakes would be more pronounced than the EPN for angry faces. We carefully controlled for differences between reptiles and faces by using lizards and neutral faces as control stimuli. Participants viewed a rapid serial visual presentation of snakes (i.e., threatening reptiles), lizards (i.e., non-threatening reptiles), angry faces (i.e., threatening humans), and neutral faces (i.e., non-threatening humans). EPNs for snakes (vs. lizards) and angry (vs. neutral) faces started to develop around 120 ms after stimulus onset. The EPN was of the same size for snakes and angry faces between 150-225 ms, but was larger for snakes than for angry faces between 225-300 ms, which suggests that snakes capture more extensive early automatic attention than angry faces. These findings correspond with the notion that the visual system is specifically tuned to detect snakes because of the prolonged pressure of snakes on primate evolution.

The effect of arousal on regulation of negative emotions using cognitive reappraisal: An ERP study.

Because the effectiveness of the emotion regulation strategy cognitive reappraisal may vary with emotion intensity, we investigated how stimulus arousal affects reappraisal success. Participants up- and down-regulated emotional responses using cognitive reappraisal to low and high arousing unpleasant pictures while the electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. Up-regulation resulted in more negative self-reported valence, while down-regulation resulted in less negative self-reported valence regardless of stimulus arousal, suggesting that subjective reappraisal success does not vary with emotional intensity. Participants felt that down-regulation of emotional responses to low arousing unpleasant pictures was easiest, which is in line with previous findings that participants showed a greater preference for reappraisal in low than high arousing situations. The late positive potential (LPP) amplitude was enhanced by down-regulation of high arousing unpleasant pictures. Even though this effect was unexpected and is opposite to the typical effect of down-regulation on the LPP, it is in line with several previous studies. Potential explanations for LPP regulation effects in the unexpected direction, such as strategy selection and task design, are evaluated. Suggestions and recommendations for future research are discussed, including using trial-by-trial manipulation of regulation instructions and studying the effect of stimulus arousal on up- and down-regulation of positive emotions.

The honest truth about deception: Demographic, cognitive, and neural correlates of child repeated deceptive behavior.

This study examined situational, psychological, and neurobiological factors associated with deceptive behavior in 8-year-old children. By assessing deception in low- and high-risk conditions, we differentiated between children displaying some dishonesty and children who deceived repeatedly, and we assessed the correlates of deception in 163 children. A large majority of the children were deceptive in the low-risk condition (n=121, 74.2%), but most children refrained from deception when at risk for getting caught (69 of 121). Using an aggregate score, children who continued deceiving could be discriminated from other children based on gender, lower age, lower IQ, less effortful control, and lower educated mothers. Compared with honest children and high-risk deceivers, low-risk deceivers differed on an aggregate score, suggesting that they were more likely to be girls and to come from higher income families. Compared with the other children, high-risk deceivers showed decreased activation in the bilateral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and right frontal pole during the low-risk condition, suggesting decreased engagement in conflict monitoring and error detection during opportunities for deception. In high-risk deceivers, high-risk deception was associated with increased bilateral ACC and right paracingulate gyrus activation compared with low-risk deception. High-risk deceivers may require a higher level of risk to engage the ACC to the same degree as low-risk deceivers or honest children. Our results suggest that deceptive behavior in children seems to be largely dependent on the estimated likelihood of getting caught. High-risk deceivers form a distinct group with different cognitive and neurobiological characteristics compared with honest children and low-risk deceivers.

Regulation of Romantic Love Feelings: Preconceptions, Strategies, and Feasibility.

Love feelings can be more intense than desired (e.g., after a break-up) or less intense than desired (e.g., in long-term relationships). If only we could control our love feelings! We present the concept of explicit love regulation, which we define as the use of behavioral and cognitive strategies to change the intensity of current feelings of romantic love. We present the first two studies on preconceptions about, strategies for, and the feasibility of love regulation. Questionnaire responses showed that people perceive love feelings as somewhat uncontrollable. Still, in four open questions people reported to use strategies such as cognitive reappraisal, distraction, avoidance, and undertaking (new) activities to cope with break-ups, to maintain long-term relationships, and to regulate love feelings. Instructed up-regulation of love using reappraisal increased subjective feelings of attachment, while love down-regulation decreased subjective feelings of infatuation and attachment. We used the late positive potential (LPP) amplitude as an objective index of regulation success. Instructed love up-regulation enhanced the LPP between 300-400 ms in participants who were involved in a relationship and in participants who had recently experienced a romantic break-up, while love down-regulation reduced the LPP between 700-3000 ms in participants who were involved in a relationship. These findings corroborate the self-reported feasibility of love regulation, although they are complicated by the finding that love up-regulation also reduced the LPP between 700-3000 ms in participants who were involved in a relationship. To conclude, although people have the preconception that love feelings are uncontrollable, we show for the first time that intentional regulation of love feelings using reappraisal, and perhaps other strategies, is feasible. Love regulation will benefit individuals and society because it could enhance positive effects and reduce negative effects of romantic love.

Increased attention and memory for beloved-related information during infatuation: behavioral and electrophysiological data.

Emotionally salient information is well attended and remembered. It has been shown that infatuated individuals have increased attention for their beloved. It is unknown whether this attention bias generalizes to information related to the beloved. Moreover, infatuated individuals report to remember trivial things about their beloved, but this has not yet been tested empirically. In two studies, we tested whether infatuated individuals have increased attention and memory for beloved-related information. In a passive viewing task (Study 1), the late positive potential, an event-related potential (ERP) component reflecting motivated attention, was enhanced for beloved-related vs friend-related words/phrases. In a recognition task (Study 2), memory performance and the frontal and parietal ERP old/new effects, reflecting familiarity and recollection, respectively, were not enhanced for beloved-related compared with friend-related words/phrases. In free recall tasks in both studies, memory was better for beloved-related than friend-related words/phrases. This research reveals that attention and memory are enhanced for beloved-related information. These attention and memory biases for beloved-related information were not due to valence, semantic relatedness, or experience, but to arousal. To conclude, romantic love has profound effects on cognition that play a clear role in daily life.

Network organization unfolds over time during periods of anxious anticipation.

Entering a state of anxious anticipation triggers widespread changes across large-scale networks in the brain. The temporal aspects of this transition into an anxious state are poorly understood. To address this question, an instructed threat of shock paradigm was used while recording functional MRI in humans to measure how activation and functional connectivity change over time across the salience, executive, and task-negative networks and how they interact with key regions implicated in emotional processing; the amygdala and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST). Transitions into threat blocks were associated with transient responses in regions of the salience network and sustained responses in a putative BNST site, among others. Multivariate network measures of communication were computed, revealing changes to network organization during transient and sustained periods of threat, too. For example, the salience network exhibited a transient increase in network efficiency followed by a period of sustained decreased efficiency. The amygdala became more central to network function (as assessed via betweenness centrality) during threat across all participants, and the extent to which the BNST became more central during threat depended on self-reported anxiety. Together, our study unraveled a progression of responses and network-level changes due to sustained threat. In particular, our results reveal how network organization unfolds with time during periods of anxious anticipation.

Time of acquisition and network stability in pediatric resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) has been shown to elucidate reliable patterns of brain networks in both children and adults. Studies in adults have shown that rs-fMRI acquisition times of ∼5 to 6 min provide adequate sampling to produce stable spatial maps of a number of different brain networks. However, it is unclear whether the acquisition time directly translates to studies of children. While there are many similarities between the brains of children and adults, many differences are also evident. Children have increased metabolism, differences in brain morphology and connectivity strengths, greater brain plasticity, and increased brain noise. Furthermore, there are differences in physiologic parameters, such as heart and respiratory rates, and compliance of the blood vessels. These developmental differences could translate into different acquisition times for rs-fMRI studies in pediatric populations. Longer scan times, however, increase the subject burden and the risk for greater movement, especially in children. Thus, the goal of this study was to assess the optimum acquisition time of rs-fMRI to extract stable brain networks in school-age children. We utilized fuzzy set theory in 84 six-to-eight year-old children and found that eight networks, including the default mode, salience, frontal, left frontoparietal, right frontoparietal, sensorimotor, auditory, and visual networks, all stabilized after ∼5½ min. The sensorimotor network showed the least stability, whereas the salience and auditory networks showed the greatest stability. A secondary analysis using dual regression confirmed these results. In conclusion, in young children with little head motion, rs-fMRI acquisition times of ∼5½ min can extract the full complement of brain networks.