For millennia, philosophers, prophets, and poets have debated and theorized about love: what it is, how to describe it, how to cultivate it.
Scientists, not so much. Indeed, only in recent decades have researchers become comfortable studying love explicitly. Previously, psychologists called the subject of their research “interpersonal attraction” or used the lens of attachment. While the term love may call to mind romance or a dyadic relationship within the family, scholars have widened the definition to encompass friendship, altruistic love, and even boundless love for all humanity.
At the Greater Good Science Center, we define love as a deep, unselfish commitment to another person’s well-being—even to the point of putting another’s interests before your own. But we’re hardly the last word on the subject.
Researchers in fields spanning psychology, sociology, neuroscience, religious studies, and philosophy disagree on how to break down love into different components and whether love constitutes an emotion, a state of being, a practice, or some combination. They study love through observation, surveys, brain imaging, and other techniques. While it’s impossible to fully capture the breadth of disciplines whose work touches on love, here’s a brief overview of how science has tackled the eternal question: What is love?
A brief history of love research
In the early 20th century, modern psychology focused almost exclusively on the individual, through the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and their exploration of personality—the id, ego, and superego—and how childhood experiences shape us into adulthood.
Those looking for love research could discern it in the work of researchers studying childhood bonding and marriage. For example, Jean Piaget and John Bowlby articulated and tested their theories of cognitive development and attachment, respectively. And investigations into marriage focused on the impact on the family and marital happiness.
“For a long time, psychologists wouldn’t talk about love,” says Charles Hill, professor of psychology at Whittier College. “They called it interpersonal attraction.”
In the 1970s, social psychologists Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Hatfield were among the first to define two kinds of love: passionate love and companionate love, “the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply entwined.”
Their work led to the development of a whole field that would explicitly study relationships and their impact on individuals’ happiness, health, and well-being. They developed a “passionate love” scale, comprising 30 questions about how the subject feels about their beloved, which has been validated in functional MRI studies showing activation in reward centers of the brain when thinking about or gazing at a photo of the person you love.
Around the same time, social psychologist Zick Rubin created a scale to separate feelings of liking and love for people who are important in our lives. He articulated love not as a feeling or emotion, but as an attitude. Love includes three components, according to his formulation:
- Cognitive: beliefs about the beloved;
- Feeling: our emotions about the person;
- Behavior: how we treat the person.
As researchers spent more time studying love, psychologist Robert J. Sternberg articulated a triangular theory of love comprising intimacy, or “feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness in loving relationships”; passion; and commitment. In new relationships, commitment is the decision that you love someone; in longer-term couples, it refers to the promise to maintain that love.
The struggle to define love
Today, researchers continue to come at love from different perspectives—and to broaden the definition to include love of strangers, place, civic institutions, and even the natural world.
Hill, of Whittier College, worked with 30 collaborators around the world to conduct a study of intimate relationships across cultures, administered online in 20 languages across 72 countries. Through a comparative factor analysis, they identified four measures that people consistently cited across eight relationship types. This love scale “has measures of caring and attachment, from Rubin, passion and intimacy from Sternberg,” Hill says. “Love is caring about another, feeling attached to that person, feeling passion towards the person and being willing to share feelings with that person.”
Arthur Aron, who studies romantic love, views love as a drive toward intimacy that leads to emotions when achieved—or thwarted. “We argue that love is a motivation, but not itself an emotion,” says Aron, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “I would define it as a strong desire to connect, to include the other in the self.”
That desire to connect can become addictive. A series of neuroscience studies documented how passionate love engages the dopamine-rich reward centers of our brains in similar ways to substances and foods that we crave. Research into cognition and memory suggests that being in love focuses the mind’s attention and memory around the loved one—while also creating a source of potential distraction.
“You have better attention for your beloved, and information that has to do with your beloved,” says Sandra Langeslag, a cognitive and biological psychologist at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. “Love distracts people from doing other things.”
Langeslag works with the model proposed by the late Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University, which divides love into three types: sexual desire, passionate love or infatuation, and companionate love or attachment. While animals do seem to experience both sexual desire and bonding, infatuation appears to be uniquely human. “I’m most intrigued by that infatuation stage,” she says.
At the peak of Berscheid’s career, she assessed the state of love research and concluded that evidence supported four types of love: companionate, friendship or philia; romantic love; attachment or bonding; and compassionate, altruistic (or agape love). “Given this topic, we won’t ever see complete agreement on scientists’ definitions of love,” predicts Beverley Fehr, a psychology professor at the University of Winnipeg.
Fehr defines love as involving feelings of caring, honesty, trust, respect, and intimacy—the characteristics that people most commonly bring up when describing any type of love. Her current research involves compassionate love in the family, such as mother-daughter relationships and expressions of support when the daughter is under stress. With Susan Sprecher, she developed a scale to measure compassionate love that Greater Good turned into a quiz.
Is love a state or a trait?
One of the key axes along which researchers differ is whether to define love as a passing experience between two people—a state that we move through—or as a fixed and enduring attitude or disposition, a trait.
In her book Love 2.0, Barbara Fredrickson describes love as a momentary emotion that swells up and expands your awareness of your surroundings, your sense of self, and your ability to truly see another person. We experience a “positivity resonance” comprising three events: “shared positive emotions, biobehavioral synchrony, and mutual care” with the other person, writes Fredrickson, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Research has found that these moments of connection increase our well-being dramatically. Studies on people directed to have meaningful interactions with the barista while buying coffee, greet and thank strangers, and chat with strangers found that these interactions increased their happiness and positivity. “Those small moments really do make a difference to our well-being,” Fehr says. “The science is very clear on that.”
“The momentary experience of love is a surge, where we feel a deep sense of commitment and care and adoration for another person,” says Sara Algoe, a psychology professor at UNC–Chapel Hill and director of the Love Consortium. Combined with that is “enacted” love: “behavior that is motivated by the experience of love and the other people who are receiving it experience it as a loving act.”
Algoe and her colleagues can observe and measure both pieces of love, under this definition. For example, they videotaped someone sharing good news with a stranger and rated how positive and excited the listener seemed. The experiment successfully predicted that those who gave more positive and enthusiastic responses reported a higher amount of love in their life, two months later. They also were rated as more loving by strangers who viewed the videotape interactions.
Jacqueline S. Mattis, a psychologist and dean of Rutgers University Newark’s School of Arts and Sciences, embraces a two-part definition of love, “a cognitive and emotional experience of affection for another or for something that leads one to then engage in acts of care or acts of inconvenient virtue,” meaning acts that require commitment, compassion, sacrifice, and grace. Her research focuses on altruism and what leads people to make sacrifices for individuals they’re not related to. “As a manifestation of love, altruism allows us to become that much more human; it deepens our capacity to understand and live into the values that define us as human,” she says.
Viewing love as a commitment or fixed trait, rather than a momentary experience, makes love “a profoundly demanding moral discipline,” says Shai Held, a rabbi, author of Judaism is About Love, and president of the Hadar Institute. “Love is an existential posture. It’s a way of holding myself in relationship to other people and the world.” To genuinely love another person, you see them for who they are and make space for them to be themselves.
In the end, all the research and disagreement over definitions of love provides more evidence of the fundamental challenge in pinning down an experience that is ultimately ineffable—that passes between two people or a group of people.
“The starting point is this mystery. We have questions, and we want dialogue so that we can better understand the mystery,” says Matthew T. Lee, a Baylor University sociology professor and director of the Human Flourishing Program’s Flourishing Network at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. “Once you start analyzing it and labeling it, you move back into the world of things.”
The bottom line for Lee? “Have a little humility. And don’t forget the poets and the great novels, and all the works of art.”
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