Is being in love just something you feel or is it more than that? What happens to your brain when you fall in love? Recent science suggests a fascinating association between being in love and peripheral serotonin. There's reason to suspect that your intimate social experiences may affect the actual biochemistry of your brain.
The focus here is on serotonin, a chemical produced within our brains to help us regulate mood and behavior. You might think of it as a happy neurotransmitter; deficits are associated with such challenges as depression, and drugs such as SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) work by allowing the presence of more serotonin.
So how does love fit into this picture? At first blush, it seems reasonable to predict that romantic love would be associated with a calming effect and potentially higher levels of serotonin. However, romantic love is complex and need not be peaceful. A passionate interest in someone can spark obsessive thinking and the type of heightened awareness linked to jealousy or anxiety. This would potentially suggest an inverse relation with serotonin. Research is clearly needed to shed more light on this picture.
Now turn to Langeslag and colleagues (2012) whose work sparks more curiosity into this issue. These researchers invited 10 men and 10 women who professed to be in love and 10 men and 10 women who were not in love into the lab to complete a series of questionnaires and to take samples of their blood plasma.
What did they learn about how the serotonergic system might be linked to romantic love? Overall, it’s a mixed picture, but one that does suggest a link. For men, being in love was tied to lower levels of peripheral serotonin… but for women, the opposite pattern was observed. Women in love measured at higher levels of serotonin that their counterparts who indicated they were not in love.
Perhaps falling in love is a mood lifter and stabilizer for men, but might have a different effect on women. This is in line with basic gender differences in romantic relationships, including observed differences in jealousy.
Interestingly, for women (but not for men), more obsessive thinking about a romantic partner was associated with more serotonin, which seems to run counter to expectations. Why was this? The authors offer no solid explanation. The pattern we might anticipate would be the reverse: more obsessive romantic love, less serotonin.
At this point, findings are correlational, rather than experimental, but they do hint at the possibility that love is much more than skin deep.