| dc.description.abstract | Love is an essential biological, psychological, sociological,
and religious phenomenon. Using various conceptual mod els, philosophers have often distinguished between different
types of love, such as self-love, romantic love, friendship love,
love of God, and neighborly love. Psychologists and neuros cientists on the other hand have thus far focused predomi nantly on understanding the emotions and behavioral and
neural mechanisms associated with romantic love and par ental love. We do not yet know how the models construed by
philosophers are related to actual experiences of love, and to
which extent they are merely nominal creations connecting
phenomena that in fact have little to do with each other. We
lack empirical knowledge of how different types of love are
experienced as embodied feelings, and how these experi ences are related to one another. Here we distinguished
between 27 different types of love. Using self-report meth ods, we measured 1) how subjective feelings of different
types of love are topographically embodied; 2) how different
types of love are associated with self-reported emotional
valence, strength of the bodily and mental experience, asso ciation with touch, time elapsed since last experienced, and
controllability; and 3) how similar different types of love feel.
Our study provides the first mapping of embodied experi ences associated with different types of love. The results
show that the subjective feelings associated with the love
types form a continuum from strongly to weakly felt loves. | vi |
