Hi!


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.