Body maps of loves

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.