Fisher and colleagues investigated the brain basis of intense romantic love. They recruited 17 people who reported being intensely 'in love'. While their brains were scanned using fMRI, each participant looked at a photograph of their beloved and, as a comparison, a photograph of a familiar but emotionally neutral acquaintance, with a distraction task in between. When looking at the beloved, participants showed greater activity in regions rich in dopamine and linked to reward and motivation, such as the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus. The researchers concluded that early-stage romantic love is associated with activity in the brain's reward and motivation systems, rather than being purely an emotion, suggesting a biological mechanism underlying attraction and mate choice.
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References: Fisher, H., Aron, A. and Brown, L. L., 2005. 'Romantic love: an fMRI study of a neural mechanism for mate choice.' Journal of Comparative Neurology, 493(1), pp. 58 to 62. source adapted.
Discuss the following study with reference to two or more of the following concepts: bias, causality, measurement, and/or responsibility.
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Fisher, Aron and Brown’s study can be discussed effectively through the concepts of measurement, causality, bias and responsibility because the strengths of the research are closely tied to its limitations. Overall, the study provides useful evidence that intense romantic love is associated with activation in brain rew