Falling in Love: Is It All Flowers, Chocolate, and Oxytocin?

When February rolls around, many people’s thoughts turn to Valentine’s Day and romantic love. They get all warm and mellow inside and crank up production of hugs and kisses.

Yet Linda Mayes, M.D., an associate professor of child psychiatry at Yale University, has an interest in romantic love that extends far beyond Valentine’s Day. She announced it at the December meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York City. She is planning to study a psychological-physiological phenomenon that scientists have scarcely heeded up to now. It is the state of falling in love.

She and a colleague will be recruiting Yale University students in romantic relationships for their study. They will then ask the students questions about their mental states during the periods when they fell in love, in hopes of gaining some insights into the process. For instance, they will be asking subjects: “What did you find especially attractive about your romantic partners?”

Mayes said that she suspects that falling in love might be akin to an obsessive-compulsive state because when young people fall in love, they are excessively preoccupied with each other.

If falling in love is similar to an obsessive-compulsive state, it may well be due to a rise in the hormone oxytocin, she believes. One reason why she suspects that this is the case is because oxytocin is known to underlie pair bonding and parenting. Another reason is that women prone to obsessions and compulsions are especially likely to engage in them during pregnancy and after delivery—times when oxytocin levels in their bodies are high.

Up to now, Mayes has been studying negative psychological-physiological arousal states in young people. For instance, she has found that youngsters who were exposed to cocaine in the womb tend to be emotionally labile and anxious, and she thinks it may hark back to cocaine’s distorting norepinephrine and serotonin levels in their brains when they were fetuses. Indeed, cocaine is known to influence norepinephrine and serotonin levels in the brain, and norepinephrine and serotonin in turn are known to be involved in the regulation of negative arousal states.

However, the positive psychological-physiological arousal state of falling in love may differ dramatically from the negative psychological-physiological arousal states that she has studied so far, Mayes hypothesized. ▪