My name's Paul Albear, I'm a senior at the University of Florida. After graduating in the fall I intend on entering business school and hopefully working in media or fashion or interior design industries. As the title of my blog presents, I love coffee and spend a large part of my my life drinking coffee or thinking about coffee.
Here's the text of a blog post I made for a class, and a podcast narrating it:
https://ufl.instructure.com/courses/341296/assignments/3276707/submissions/928186
(Benes-Trapp, 2017)
What Do We
Talk About When We Talk About Love?
Can you say you’re in-love or out of love? What does
being in-love feel like? What do we talk about when we talk about love? Perhaps
some of the things we should consider when trying to unravel this complicated
question are the bits and pieces in human chemistry associated with love. Chemicals,
hormones, and reactions these two items create—these are the three details
sought out in Donatella Marazziti and Domenico Canale’s study Hormonal Changes When Falling in Love.
The two researchers aim at understanding what happens to our bodies when we’re
in love, how men and women become different while in love, and how we become
somehow more similar.
Hormonal
Changes takes a step back. First off, the study wants us to think about
Love, where it comes from. Love, as Marazitti and Canale are interested in it,
is and has been important to humans for years and years. Love is important, and
Marazitti and Canale repeatedly make its importance known, especially since it
owes to biology and our roles as animals. Both view love as important, especially
in mammals, noting love as a way to secure both the raising of children and
also to provide a safe environment for said possible children. Love, then, has
subtle attachments to our mammalian biological demands and needs. But love in
modern thought isn’t just a biological detail; it’s something found in “virtually
all societies” and visually important to humans (Marazziti and Canale 357). In almost every human culture, people exude, as
Marazziti and Canale note, a “perceived altered mental state, intrusive
thoughts and images of the other, sets of behavioral patterns aimed at
eliciting a reciprocal response” (Marazziti and Canale 357). So, and this is
what the project concerns most: what really happens to us when we fall in love?
Well, a lot happens.
So project calls for 24 individuals, 12 male and 12 female, all of who have recently, within the past six months, fallen in love. All of these people declared to be in love, chose to participate, and in turn worked with the two researchers to track the various hormonal secretions given off while being in love. These 24 in-love people were chosen to be the independent group, and 24 other people either in long-lasting relationships—so peoples who have already fallen in love but no longer experience the same obsessiveness as someone in-love—or single peoples, to compare. The research, specifically, “aimed at evaluating the levels of some pituitary, adrenal, and gonadal hormones in a homogenous group of subjects of both sexes who were in the early, romantic phases of a loving relationship, and to compare them with those subjects who were single or were already in long-lasting relationships (Marazitti and Canale 357).
So these 24 people are studied. Marazziti and Canale
study the peoples hormone levels—FSH, LH, estradiol, progesterone, testosterone,
DHEAS, cortisol, androstenedione—and conclude their study based off the
discrepancies in numbers the 24 in-love participants provide and the numbers
the single or long-lasting relationships give. But interestingly, the results
differ greatly from what gendered hormones actually do when falling in love.
Firstly, levels of Coritisol, in those recently in
love, were significantly higher than those not in-love or in long
relationships. Levels of LH, estradiol, progesterone, DHEAS and androstenedione
changed little. FSH levels were lower in
men. However, levels of testosterone changed greatly, significantly-- in women: Testosterone, the commonly gendered
male hormone excreted more from women in love then from men in love. And in a
lot of these hormone levels, particularly cortisol, testosterone, and FSH, the
same levels in 16 subjects were absolutely the same 12 to 28 months later.
Bias of course needs talking about. The two
researchers address what they think could arouse suspicion, namely: the time
span of when one is in love and not and the concern over OCD linkage to love.
The prior, time span, is of course a difficult detail to pin down: the study
chose love’s duration to be somewhere in between 18 months and 3 years, and of
course many would say this timeline is useless and tries to make something
specific (how long one is in love for) out of something completely common.
Their bias posits people are not in the kind of love they’re interested in
after 3 years time.
Secondly, Marazitti and Canale had to subvert their
study of love with the stipulation that their subjects were in-love, not
predisposed to OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) events, which some would
posit love as. This problem was averted through luck: all 24 subjects had
families without OCD tendencies and had not had any OCD events during their
lives. All subjects also passed these tests, and in doing so omitted Marazitti
and Canale’s study from problems associated with this narrative. They understood
it important to prove each subject present a socially acceptable form of
obsession, not one some would denounce as inconclusive and inappropriate for
this study.
So, what are we talking about when we are talking
about love? Cortisol and testosterone, apparently, seeing as they are the two
most evident affects of Love in the study. Overtly, the study posits Love as a
concept creating physiological reactions in the human body. Both men and women develop
jumps in cortisol hormone excretion when compared with those not in-love or in
long standing relationships. Testosterone, interestingly, occurs at a greater
level in women, not men. Testosterone, a commonly male gendered hormone, is
actually higher in women. Both men and women, while in love, seem in flux.
Both, as Marazitti and Canale posit, seem to enter this sort of place where men
and women, both caught up in love, undergo hormonal, physical, changes. Falling
in love, then, seems to “temporarily eliminate some differences between the
sexes” (Marazitti and Canale 360).
Bibliography
Marazziti, Donatella, and
Domenico Canale. “Hormonal Changes When Falling in Love.” Psychoneuroendocrinology, vol. 29, no.
7, 2004, pp. 931–936., doi:10.1016/j.psyneuen.2003.08.006.
Images
Cited
Benes-Trapp, Kylah. “Elite
Daily.” Elite Daily, 2017,
elitedaily.com/dating/holding-hands-relationship/1803205/. Accessed 27 July
2017.
Works
Consulted
Carver, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
London, Vintage, 2009.
