Abstract
The effects of the human pair-bonded state of “romantic love” on cognitive function remain relatively unexplored. Theories on cognitive priming suggest that a state of love may activate love-relevant schemas, such as mentalizing about the beliefs of another individual, and may thus improve mentalizing abilities. On the other hand, recent functional MRI (fMRI) research on individuals who are in love suggests that several brain regions associated with mentalizing may be “deactivated” during the presentation of a love prime, potentially affecting mentalizing cognitions and behaviors. The current study aimed to investigate experimentally the effect of a love prime on a constituent aspect of mentalizing—the attribution of emotional states to others. Ninety-one participants who stated they were “deeply in love” with their romantic partner completed a cognitive task involving the assessment of emotional content of facial stimuli (the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task) immediately after the presentation of either a love prime or a neutral prime. Individuals were significantly better at interpreting the emotional states of others after a love prime than after a neutral prime, particularly males assessing negative emotional stimuli. These results suggest that presentation of a love stimulus can prime love-relevant networks and enhance subsequent performance on conceptually related mentalizing tasks.
Keywords: cognition, mentalizing, pair-bonding, romantic love, theory of mind
The intense emotions associated with human pair-bonding are considered to be a human universal—experienced in some form by every culture and evident in the earliest human oral and written records (Dunbar, 2012; Gottschall & Nordlund, 2006; Jankowiak & Fischer, 1992). The pervasiveness of this form of bonding likely exists because it serves an important function in the context of human mating: namely coordinating parental investments under the auspices of biparental care (Clutton-Brock, 1989; Fraley, Brumbaugh, & Marks, 2005; Kleiman, 1977). Human infants are secondarily altricial, requiring substantial support during rearing because of their relative underdevelopment at birth compared with other mammals and primates (Bogin, 1999), driven in part by the mismatch between our inordinately large brains and the size limitations placed on the female birth-canal by the evolution of bipedal locomotion (Rosenberg & Trevathan, 1995; Ruff, 1995). Such high levels of dependency require intense levels of time and resource investment, with chances of individual offspring survival vastly improved in the active presence of two parents (for a review, see Geary, 2000). Biparental coordination of investment is most commonly maintained through the formation of exclusive pair-bonded mating attachments—commonly referred to in humans as ‘romantic love’ (Fisher, Aron, & Brown, 2006; Fisher, 1989; Mellen, 1981).