Reader's Digest version

There is a ton of research out there about attachment dating back to the 1940s.  And it just keeps on going, including current research backing the theory of Emotionally-Focused Couples Therapy (which is all about attachment in adulthood to our significant others).  But if you are like me...sometimes you just want the Reader's Digest version...so here it is.  Since it was so short I just typed it up.

Love on the Mind

How relationships affect your brain

by Diane Ackerman

Thanks to a new field of research called interpersonal neurobiology, scientists are beginning to understand how feelings of love (or the lack of them) can impact specific areas of the brain.  The evidence:

TOUCH HEALS
For a study at the University of Virginia, scientists threatened married women with an electric shock.  When they held their husbands' hands during the experiment, the women's anterior cingulate cortexes and other pain and anxiety-related centers in the brain showed significantly less activation than when they held hands with others or with no one at all.

FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTENT
Research from Stony Brook University showed that when men and women in happy relationships looked at photographs of their partners, their brain's pleasure center, including the accumbens, lit up.  The brains of long-married couples also registered feelings of attachment and calm in the globus pallidus and other regions.

LOVE HURTS
According to Columbia University scientists, the same areas of the brain associated with physical pain, such as the dorsal posterior insula, are active when someone experiences rejection.

readersdigest.com 7/12-8/12

Family Digest
edited by Beth Dreher