Love is a feeling that has no limits because loving, beyond a biological, psychological or sociological phenomenon, has a thousand ways of feeling. Although different types of love have often been distinguished, such as self-love, romantic love, love of friendship, love of God, and love of neighbor; But psychologists and neuroscientists differentiate up to 27 types of love.
So how do you know if it’s true love? Apparently Finnish researchers from Aalto University have analyzed emotions and neural and behavioral mechanisms to discover where love is felt, or better yet where your body experiences this feeling depending on the type of love.
We lack empirical knowledge about how different types of love are experienced as embodied feelings and how these experiences relate to each other. However, researchers have created a map of where in the body different types of love are felt and with what intensity they are experienced.
It must be said that their first discovery, not very surprising, indicates that the types of love associated with close relationships are similar in their signature of feeling and are the most experienced. And on the other hand, his findings, published in ‘Philosophical Psychology’, suggest that different types of love are formed or felt from weakest to strongest.
The team surveyed participants 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 themselves. The team asked participants where they felt different types of love in their bodies and how intense the feeling was physically and mentally.
To build the map, researchers collected data from hundreds of participants through an online survey. The majority of responses came from young women in higher education. Participants were asked to color a body silhouette to show where they felt each type of love. They were also asked how the different types felt physically and mentally, how pleasant the sensation was and how it was associated with touch. Finally, they were asked to rate the closeness of the types of love.
All types were felt strongly in the head, but differed in the rest of the body: some extended only to the chest, while others were felt everywhere. Stronger forms of love were felt more widely throughout the body. “Love between people is divided into sexual and non-sexual. The closest types of love are those that have a sexual or romantic dimension. It was also interesting to find a strong correlation between the physical and mental intensity of the emotion and its pleasantness. How much “The stronger a type of love is felt in the body, the stronger it is felt in the mind and the more pleasurable it is,” said philosopher Pärttyli Rinne, who coordinated the study.
The team was intrigued by the fact that all the different types of love are felt in the head. While when you go from a more experienced love to a less experienced type of love, the sensations in the chest area weaken. “It may be that, for example, love for strangers or wisdom are associated with a cognitive process. It may also be that there are pleasant sensations in the head area. This is something that should be investigated further,” he said. Rinne.
Rinne also points out that there are cultural differences in love and that the demographics of the study group are tied to the experience of love. If the same study were done in a highly religious community, the love of God might be the most intensely experienced love of all. Likewise, if subjects were parents in a relationship, as in our ongoing brain study project, love for children would possibly be observed as the strongest love.
The most positive and heartfelt average feelings were for sexual, romantic, reciprocal, true and passionate love. On average, the shortest time in which he did feel the experience of love was the love of nature, and the longest time is the love of God. Subjects reported that they have the least control over the types of love related to kinship relationships (father’s and mother’s love for their child, parental love). The type of love that one experienced least strongly was self-love.
While those with types of love related to sexuality (sexual, passionate, romantic) had strong bodily feelings. Those that were felt the most in all parts of the body, from the head to the stomach and with greater intensity. These three types of love were also the highest-rated types of love in terms of their association with body contact; with up to 27 related stimuli.
In general, the most distinct areas of subjectively felt bodily activation in different types of love are the chest and head, likely indicating changes in heart rate, breathing, and facial expressions, including possible blushing. On the other hand, the feelings associated with weaker types of love tend to concentrate in the head. This may be because subjects associate more abstract concepts such as wisdom or morality with the brain and higher cognitive functions.
