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Abstract
Romantic love has been the source for some of the greatest achievements of mankind throughout the ages. The recent localization of romantic love within subcortico–cortical reward, motivation and emotion systems in the human brain has suggested that love is a goal-directed drive with predictable facilitation effects on cognitive behavior, rather than a pure emotion. Here we show that the subliminal exposure of a beloved's name (romantic prime) during a lexical decision task dramatically improves performance in women in love (Experiment 1), as the subliminal presentation of a passion's descriptive noun does (Experiment 2). The parallel between love and passion allows us to interpret these facilitation effects as corresponding to cognitive top-down processes within a motivation-enhanced neural network.
Acknowledgments
This research is supported by the Committee for Protection of Human Subjects, the Swiss National Foundation, and the Swiss National Foundation for research in Biology and Medicine, grant #1223/PASMA 111563/1.
The authors thank Professor Todd Heatherton and Professor George Wolford for their helpful comments on the manuscript