Science Of Romance: How CU Researchers Can Help Your Love Life
BOULDER, CO — Love can inspire us to act in ways that seem surprising, even inexplicable. That’s why it’s not a bad idea to have an in-house team of scientists working to discover exactly what love does to us — and how we can make the pain disappear after romance goes wrong. Here, we are fortunate enough to have the experts at CU working tirelessly to help Boulderites understand the most intimate matters of the heart this Valentine’s Day.
The power of touch
Pavel Goldstein, a postdoctoral pain researcher in CU’s Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab, was the lead author on a 2018 study that found that hand holding can sync your brainwaves between loved ones and even ease pain. According to CU Boulder Today, Goldstein came up with the idea for the experiment after the birth of his daughter, when he noticed that holding his wife’s hand during labor helped to ease her pain.
He partnered with researchers at University of Haifa to recruit 22 heterosexual couples, age 23 to 32, who had been together for at least one year. The couples were set up in several two-minute scenarios, with one assigned to be a pain receiver and the other a pain observer and measured their brainwave activity with electroencephalography caps. Scenarios included sitting together not touching, sitting together holding hands, and sitting together in separate rooms.
They found that just being in one another’s presence could enhance synchronicity in wavelengths of the couples’ brains that are associated with focused attention. The coupling was the strongest when they held hands while the female participant was in pain
Merely being in each other’s presence, with or without touch, was associated with some brain wave synchronicity in the alpha mu band, a wavelength associated with focused attention. If they held hands while she was in pain, the coupling increased the most.
“We have developed a lot of ways to communicate in the modern world and we have fewer physical interactions,” Goldstein told CU Boulder Today. “This paper illustrates the power and importance of human touch.”
What have voles got to do with it?
Zoe Donaldson, an assistant professor of behavioral neuroscience, is studying why some people have a harder time than others recovering from mourning the loss of a loved one, and how they can heal. For help, she recruited a colony of 100 prairie voles — one of the only mammal species besides humans that forms monogamous relationships. Previous research has found that oxytocin — the “feel-good” hormone in the brain associated with trust and empathy — plays an important role in the bonds that humans and voles form with one another.
With a $1.5 million dollar High Risk, High Reward grant, Donaldson is working to discover how brain chemistry can help us learn how to heal from heartbreak.
“Ultimately, my hope is that by understanding what happens normally when we adapt to a loss, we can gain insight into how we can facilitate or stimulate this normal adaptive process with new therapies,” Donaldson told CU Boulder Today. “Losing someone you love shouldn’t mean losing out on joy for the rest of your life.”
A placebo for heartbreak?
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Tor Wagner, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, has found that the placebo effect not only works to ease physical pain, but it can help with heartbreak too. According to Wagner’s research, if you believe that what you are doing will help you get over your ex, it probably will.
Wagner was a senior author on a study that provided test subjects who had recently experienced an “unwanted break-up” with either a nasal spray the researchers promised was a “powerful analgesic effective in reducing emotional pain,” or one they said was was a simple saline solution.
The subjects were asked to step into a machine both before and after the treatment, where they looked at photos of their ex, were asked to recount the breakup, and were subjected to physical pain through a hot stimulus on the forearm. Although the nasal sprays were actually no different, those who believed that they had experienced a healing spritz not only reported feeling objectively better, but researchers were able to measure differences in brain chemistry in regions associated with modulating emotion, rejection, and those that release painkilling brain chemicals.
“Just the fact that you are doing something for yourself and engaging in something that gives you hope may have an impact,” Wager told CU Boulder Today. “In some cases, the actual chemical in the drug may matter less than we once thought.”
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