中国科学院行为科学重点实验室知识库

爱情是一种跨文化普遍存在的现象.从20世纪90年代以来,爱情已经成为神经生物学、认知神经科学、心理学等多学科的新研究焦点.对爱情及其相关行为的脑功能成像研究发现,爱情主要激活奖赏环路,尤其是腹侧被盖区和尾状核;抑制与社会判断、负性情绪有关的脑区活动,如外侧前额叶皮层、后扣带皮层、杏仁核等.这提示爱情并不是一种单一情绪,而是一种类似于金钱奖赏的激励动机;同时爱情会降低人们对所爱对象的社会判断力.爱情所激活和抑制的脑区既有跨文化的一致性,也有差异性.另一方面,爱情也会导致人体内多种激素和神经递质的变化,包括皮质醇、多巴胺、五羟色胺、后叶催产素和加压素、神经生长因子等.最后,我们从爱情的测量方法、研究手段以及爱情对行为决策的可能影响等方面,讨论了爱情领域未来研究的可能方向.

Romantic love is a cross-cultural phenomenon and a major focus of current neurobiology and cognitive neuropsychology since the 1990s. The paper first reviews literature about functional neuroimaging of romantic love and its related social behaviors. Several studies have consistently found that the brain regions activated by romantic love are part of the reward circuit, especially the ventral tegmental area and the caudate, while the deactivated regions mainly involve regions often implicated in social judgment and negative emotion, including the lateral prefrontal and parietal cortices, the posterior cingulate cortex, and the amygdala. These findings suggest that on the one hand, love is a reward and motivation, not a single emotion; on the other hand, romantic love will decrease a person’s judgment ability towards the loved person. Both cross-cultural consistency and inconsistency are reported in brain activation and deactivation for romantic love. Additionally, this paper reviews the findings related to hormones and neurotransmitters in those participants who were in love. Finally, research methods employed to study romantic love are discussed, and future directions for further development are proposed.