The Speed of Passionate Love, As a Subliminal Prime: A High-Density Electrical Neuroimaging Study

Abstract

In line with the psychological model of self-expansion, recent neuroimaging evidence shows an overlap between the brain network mediating passionate love and that involved in self-representation. Nevertheless, little remains known about the temporal dynamics of these brain areas. To address this question, we recorded brain activity from 20 healthy participants using high-density electrophysiological recordings while participants were performing a cognitive priming paradigm known to activate the so-called love brain network. Our results show that when a person is feeling high passionate love, the subliminal presentation of their beloved's name evokes specific brain states that are mediated by generators located in the pleasure, reward and cognitive brain pathways. More precisely, visual areas are activated in the first milliseconds after stimulus onset, then higher-order associative brain areas, such as those involved in self-related processes (e.g., the angular gyrus/temporoparietal junction) are activated, and finally a flow of backward activation seems to occur from these associative brain areas to the primary visual and emotional brain areas. These results reinforce the neuro-functional top-down model of interpersonal relationships, suggesting that associative brain areas may prime more basic brain area sat a pre-conscious stage (i.e., starting at 80ms post-stimulus onset) of information processing. This raises the question of the various states of consciousness in people feeling in passionate love.

Romantic Love and Attentional Biases Toward Attractive Alternatives and Rivals: Long-Term Relationship Maintenance Among Female Chinese College Students

“…On the other hand, committed women with high levels of chronic jealousy significantly increased their attention to and experienced difficulties with disengagement from attractive same-sex targets when subliminally primed with love. Subliminal priming of love can activate participants’ mental representation associated with love and occurs at an associative level ( Cacioppo et al, 2012 ). Thus, it could activate negative mental representations associated with the love of committed Chinese women, such as partner infidelity and betrayal, which could activate mate-guarding motivation, leading individuals with high levels of chronic jealousy to be attentive to attractive same-sex targets ( Maner, Miller, et al, 2009 ).…”

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“…When viewing landscape painting, place, or portrait photographs, positive subliminal prime words increased the subject's preference for the painting (Gibbons 2009, Mohan et al 2016. Similarly, when presenting subliminally beloved names, the neural network related to pleasure and reward was activated (Cacioppo et al 2012). Exposure to the subliminal sexual image was associated with higher activation in arousal-related areas as well as the behavioral control network for women compared to men, indicating that women were more sensitive to this image compared to men (Gillath and Canterberry 2012).…”

EEG Microstates in Social and Affective Neuroscience

“…Microstate analysis of ERPs enables the researcher to identify, time, and sequence neurophysiological processes across distinct experimental conditions or trial types, such as anxiety vs. no-anxiety (Nash et al 2023 ), conditioned fear vs. safety stimuli (Pizzagalli et al 2003 ; Mueller and Pizzagalli 2016 ), direct vs. averted gaze (Burra et al 2016 ), honest vs. dishonest decisions (Globig et al 2023 ), ingroup- vs. outgroup-related information (Walker et al 2008 ; Schiller et al 2020a ), less vs. more attractive faces (Han et al 2020 , 2022 ), self- vs. other-voice processing (Iannotti et al 2022 ), social vs. non-social stimuli/contexts (Thierry et al 2006 ; Ortigue et al 2009 , 2010 ; Cacioppo et al 2012 , 2015 , 2016 , 2018 ; Koban et al 2012 ; Decety and Cacioppo 2012 ; Pegna et al 2015 ), stereotype-congruent vs. stereotype-incongruent information (Schiller et al 2016 ), stress vs. no stress (Schiller et al 2023a ) and neutral vs. emotional stimuli (Pizzagalli et al 2000 ; Gianotti et al 2007 , 2008 ; Cacioppo et al 2016 ; Tanaka et al 2021 ; Zerna et al 2021 ; Liang et al 2022 ; Prete et al 2022 ) (Fig. 3 ).…”