This is the Science of Happiness. I'm Dacher Keltner. Welcome to Episode 2 of our Science of Love series. Today, Gina Davis returns as our host, taking us deeper into the science of why we love and the many ways love shows up in our lives. Tomorrow, we explore how love and grief are intertwined, our deep bond with the natural world, and the ways love connects us to our communities and the world around us. I wanna be loved by you, just you, and nobody else but you. I wanna be loved by you, love. What is love? Love is this neurobiological state of being. To me, love is somebody caring enough to find out and remember all of the niche sort of little details about you. Loving someone or something is finding them so excellent and desirable that you want to make them part of who you are. When you're describing the way love is, you're not going to come up with an Aristotelian definition like you would for a triangle. I'm Gina Davis. Welcome to The Science of Love, a special by the Science of Happiness podcast. In our last episode, we began exploring the science of love, how it evolved, and how it shapes our closest bonds. We heard about love between parents and children, romantic partners, and even the ways love affects our microbiome. Today, we continue that journey, exploring how to keep romance alive, what sex has to do with it, and also the love we feel for our friends, our families, and our four-legged companions. The Science of Love, after this break. I'm Gina Davis. Welcome back to The Science of Love, a special by the Science of Happiness podcast. last. Falling in love can feel easy, but staying in love? That takes ongoing effort. Fortunately, there's a science to it. After 50 years of studying tens of thousands of couples, researchers Julie and John Gottman have identified ways to help romance last. One of them is a simple daily check-in. Take 10 minutes to really connect. A check-in means just asking your partner, how was your day? How are you doing? That's Julie. You really want to see what were the highs, what were the lows. And if there's stress involved, help that partner be less alone with whatever is stressing them. Also, keep an eye out for those subtle bids for connection. A quick glance, a smile, a sigh, or the way they call your name from another room. We brought couples into the lab for 24 hours. And what we saw is that in the little moments when one partner made a bid for connection, as simple as saying, wow, look out the window, there's a beautiful bird. And your partner responds to you by looking out there and saying, oh, yeah, that's all it takes. That's all it takes to make relationships more successful. You can also try asking some open-ended questions, ones that invite them to share more. My favorite question is, do you have a dream about doing something, having a bucket list, or experiencing something that I don't know about because I want to hear it? Play detective by looking out for all the good things your partner does during the day and then letting them know you see it. see it. Changing a habit of mind changes you so that you notice all the good things that are happening in your life. That's John. Because now you can express gratitude for what is happening, so that good stuff happens more often. The Gottman's research shows that couples who show gratitude by giving real compliments fare better. And if you're stuck finding one? Look beyond. Look beyond. Don't just look at the day-to-day. This is where that positive habit of mind comes in. Remember to cuddle, hold hands, or give each other hugs. Lab studies show that when couples touch affectionately, it not only strengthens their bond, it also synchronizes activity in the regions of the brain tied to social connection and emotion. Last but not least, go on a date. That could mean a night out dancing or alone time on the porch after the kids fall asleep. The largest study that's ever been done on what makes for great sex and romance and passion with 70,000 people in 24 countries found that people who say they have a great sex life really do have a date night where they're not talking about their long to-do list, but they're really connecting with each other and keeping romance alive. But what does a great sex life look like? And what's love got to do with it? Sometimes the tensions between love and sex explain some of the greatest challenges in our relationships. Justin Garcia is an evolutionary biologist, anthropologist, and one of the world's top sex researchers. We know that love and sex are important in people's lives. We know that it's part of a deep evolutionary story of what it means to be human, but we also know that there's a lot of variation in what makes love and sex work for people. I think sometimes folks might think, oh, I should be having a certain amount of sexual activity in my romantic life, or it's not fulfilling. But that's not actually what the data says. What the research shows is that the right amount of sex for your relationship is how much feels good to you, how much feels right. And one of my pet peeves is when I hear groups or someone say, oh, you should be having sex X amount of times. And in fact, I'm convinced that for some couples that would totally ruin their relationship, that more is not always better. Garcia says that to understand the real cause of those tensions between love and sex, we have to zoom out. The bigger picture for me is how do we navigate our love, our romantic desires, our desires for connection, our desires for safety, psychological safety, with also the desires for the excitement and the novelty that comes with sexual activity. And that's a challenge for a lot of people. He says the first step is to understand the evolutionary roots of monogamy In evolutionary biology there two different aspects There sexual monogamy or fidelity and there a question of how many sexual partners do you have Then there's social monogamy. Species that form intense social bonds, romantic bonds, what we would maybe call romantic love in humans, but they still have sex with their neighbors. And so that tension we see all over the animal kingdom. And in fact, it's very much part of the human story. So we know, for instance, folks that engage in polyamory, it's really important to promote trust among all the partners. If you spend too much time with one, then the other can get jealous. All of that we can understand by understanding the push and pull of social and sexual monogamy. Regardless of how many partners you have, if you're wanting to have good sex, maybe even great sex, research shows that having a caring and enthusiastic partner, someone you feel emotionally connected to, is key. When they're aligned, when what we want on both the love and the sex moment, when we have both of it, it is so intoxicating. Our relationships feel so rich and fulfilling, like a fuel that could carry us to the moon and back. When we think about love, romance often comes to mind first. But is it the most important? There are many forms of love, and there isn't a hierarchy. Romantic love doesn't sit at the top. I'm afraid that's a multi-billion dollar love industry that's told you it does. That's anthropologist Anna Machen. They're all equally beneficial. So do you have love with your friends? Do you have love with your community? Do you have love with your dog or your God or your children or your sister or brother or anyone? Look for that love because we now know that the relationships you build, the love that you have in your life, whatever form of love it might be, is the biggest factor in your mental and physical health, your longevity and your well-being. There is an enormous body of evidence behind that now. Up next, we hear what science is uncovering about the many other important relationships in our lives, like our friendships, our families, and the love we feel for our furry companions. I'm Gina Davis. Stay with us for more Science of Love. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker. I host a podcast called A Slight Change of Plans that combines behavioral science and storytelling to help us navigate the big changes in our lives. I get so choked up because I feel like your show and the conversations are what the world needs, encouraging, empowering, counter-programming that acts like a lighthouse when the world feels dark. Listen to A Slight Change of Plans wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Gina Davis. Welcome back to The Science of Love, a special by the Science of Happiness podcast. One of the most important kinds of relationships is friendship. The people in your life who are your ride or die, the Thelma to your Louise. Suka Kalantari reports from Berkeley, California, how some researchers are looking to a surprising source to learn more about the neuroscience of platonic love. It's Sunday morning, and Annalise Beery is kneeling over some bushes in her backyard, holding a metal bin filled with Cheerios, a hay-like filling, and two small animals huddled in a corner. So I'm just going to pick up this little girl and show you what a vole looks like. A California prairie vole. Voles are small, brown. They're a little larger than most tiny mice. They have short tails and their ears tend to lie flat against their head. So if it looks like a little brown, nondescript rodent, there's a chance it's a vole. Beery runs the Beery Lab at UC Berkeley, where she studies voles. Vols. So vols are very unusual because they form selective social bonds with one another. And prairie vols do this in all sorts of contexts. They form these friendship-like relationships, and then they also form a bond with a romantic partner, regardless of what's happening with a few extra flings on the side. Decades of research have turned prairie vols into a one-of-a-kind model for exploring the social brain. Come on in. Hello? Inside Beery's lab, there's a definite vibe. A t-shirt is pinned to a wall with a cartoon of three voles hugging. One is drinking a beer. There are vole paintings and stuffies, and a drawing of a vole with bubble letters saying, where's the applesauce? They love applesauce. We use applesauce as a reward for them sometimes. But what makes the lab unique isn't the quirky decor. It's that, unlike most labs focused on vole romance, Beery's focuses on the neurobiology of friendship. In our lab, we do a lot to say how are romantic or mate-related bonds different from peer or friendship-related bonds. And what does a vole friendship look like? It looks like any snuggling. We call it huddling instead of cuddling, but it's really the same. It's being side by side. Sometimes one is snuggled up on top of the other one. Usually they're resting next to each other. Sometimes one is grooming the other one. Beery's lab recently took a closer look at oxytocin in the brain. You know, what people call the love hormone? Oxytocin does get called the love hormone and the cuddle hormone a lot in the news. And I think where we go a little bit astray is that no neurochemical really has a single function, and oxytocin's no different in that regard. Oxytocin can spike during things like sex, kissing, childbirth, and during less cuddly times as a response to stress. Lab studies show voles can bond romantically without it, but it takes longer. Beery wanted to see if the same goes for friendships. She worked with genetically modified prairie voles that lacked a key oxytocin receptor, so their bodies couldn't produce the hormone. Then they put those voles in little rooms together. Prairie voles were very slow to form new relationships. They took much longer than it normally takes, and then those relationships were more fragile. In another experiment, her team put the oxytocin-free voles in a sort of maze with multiple rooms that were all connected by tubes. I think of this as the party format study, where if you go to a party with a friend and you're bonded to that friend and you're a little socially nervous, you might stick to that friend for a while before you start to branch out. That's normally the case with voles and humans. But the voles that were missing their oxytocin receptors, you couldn't even tell that they had come with a partner. They immediately mixed. So oxytocin really seems to be important for that new phase of a relationship and forming a relationship. I always tend to come at things from a wonder of science basic science angle but all of this research has a really big potential applicability to understanding humans And human conditions like autism and schizophrenia which can make it harder for people to connect Nearly every different social disorder or diagnosis that has a social component impacts these peer relationships. Many people have said we have an isolation epidemic. So understanding not only what neurochemicals, but what sorts of environmental circumstances play a role. We can learn things that are really directly applicable to humans. She thinks friendships are especially important to study because they're the core of our relationships. Maybe peer relationships are more common than monogamy and provide a foundation from which monogamy has repeatedly evolved. And wouldn't it be interesting to find out that many more species show these sort of peer relationships, these friendship-like relationships? I'm Shuka Kalantari, reporting from UC Berkeley. Back in the human world of shifting emotions, heartbreaks, and connections, friendships can be even more complex and sometimes unattended to. So in my young 20s, I was not focused on friendship. I was focused on romantic love, and it was not going well. That's Marissa G. Franco, a psychologist and expert on the science of friendship. I remember going through a breakup, and I felt so bad. So I asked my friend Heather, Heather, how about we create this wellness group? We will meditate, cook, do yoga. And it was really to heal from that romantic breakup. Heather said yes, and me and a group of friends would meet every week to practice wellness. And I looked around and I asked myself, like, why doesn't this form of love matter to me? Why I've been so focused on romantic love, feeling like I have no love in my life unless it's romantic, like I'm not worthy unless I have a romantic partner. Like, why doesn't this love count? We just treat friendship as something that we take for granted, something that's nice to have but not necessary, something that we don't have to put effort into, something that, you know, people are less likely to work through conflict with friends than romantic partners. And we have this all wrong. Research shows that when we don't have friends, or when the friendships we do have are unhealthy, we're twice as likely to die prematurely, a risk even greater than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Even when we have a romantic partner we really love, likely a lot of us still struggle with feelings of loneliness because our fundamental human needs are not met through one person. Friendships can not only make us less depressed, but they spill over and contribute to our spouses feeling less depressed too. And our romantic relationships thrive the most when we consider our romantic partners our friends. It's friendship that is at the center of the success of romantic partnerships. We need friendships to thrive. But how do we make friends? There was a study where people were told that they would go into a group and be liked based off of personality questionnaires they filled out. This was a lie. The researchers were using deception. But when they thought they would be liked, they suddenly became friendlier and warmer and more open. And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy where people that assume they're liked get liked because assuming you're liked triggers these friendly behaviors. And friendships don't always just happen. You need to make an effort. One study that tracked people's beliefs about connection and their loneliness over time found that when people thought friendship was something that happened without effort, they were lonelier five years later. Whereas the people that thought friendship takes effort were less lonely five years later because they made that effort. Which leads to Franco's next bit of advice. Try to reconnect with people. Are there people in your life that you've fallen out of touch with that you already know you kind of get along with? Also, do the things that you love in community. So go to a dance class, go to a language class. And the reason that I say a class, right, rather than like a single event, is because of something called the mere exposure effects, which is this finding that the more that we are exposed to something, the more that we like it. And this applies to people. And so can you join something that's repeated over time so you give mere exposure effects a chance to set in? Another relationship where we often have to put in effort is with our families. And those dynamics can be tricky. Everybody values family. There's no doubt about it. That's a human thing. But we have different ideas about how to show our value for family. Belinda Campos is a psychologist at UC Irvine, where she studies the effects of familism or familial love. It's a cultural value that emphasizes warm, close, supportive family relationships and prioritizes interdependence over independence. Those of us who report greater endorsement of this more interdependent way of being actually report favorable responses in terms of their bodily response, their stress hormone response. She says Western cultures often see familism as something that holds us back. really started as being seen as something that was a deficit, something that had to be changed in order to do well in the United States. But Campos' studies have shown the opposite, that familial love is not a deficit, but an advantage. When you grow up around these ideals about family and closeness, those ideas translate into socialization practices, how we learn to share, how we learn to put others before the self, how we learn to manage our relationships that ends up being really good for our relationships, not just in our families, but outside to our romantic partners, to our friends, and other kinds of relationships. We've been talking about love as something expansive, woven into our relationships with partners, friends, family, and our physiology. But love doesn't stop with other people. For many of us, it extends into the rest of the animal kingdom. After all, a lot of us don't just have pets. We consider them family. An estimated 60 million households in the U.S. include a dog. The relationships we have with our pets, particularly dogs, it is an attachment relationship. It is a loving relationship that goes both ways, and it is underpinned by the same set of hormones as human-to-human love is. That's evolutionary anthropologist Anna Machen again. There's been some brilliant studies done, both looking at brain activations in humans and brain activations in dogs, actually, when they're interacting with their human. And you do see the fingerprints of love, and you see the activations associated with attachment. So it would appear that that is what we would define as a loving relationship Research shows just petting a dog can lower cortisol the stress hormone And spending time with them can make us more cooperative, friendly, active, and more attentive to the people around us. I love my dog Frankie. And I feel like he loves me too. That's reporter Truk Nguyen. Frankie definitely feels like he's a part of my family. Are you so happy to see that? He loses his mind when he sees my friends. Most studies on love and dogs have focused on how we feel about them, how they help us. But what about how they feel? Do they pick up on our social cues, like who we trust, who we like, and use that information to make their own decisions? To find out, we put Frankie and Wyn on their first airplane ride together to do an experiment at a canine laboratory and learn about how our dogs understand the world through us. That would take both people to the plane for departure. Enjoy you all tonight. Come on, let's turn left here. We're going to head right down the stairs. This way, Frankie. That's Zach Silver. He founded the Canine Intelligence Lab here at Occidental College. Frankie and I are here to take part in what his team calls an affiliation study. We're curious if Frankie is sort of seeing the world through your eyes here. They want to know, will Frankie pick up on my social preferences, and will he use that information to make decisions? Like, well, my primary point of contact in the world, this person I spend the most time with, seems to be friends with one person. Should I be friends with that person, too? Come on. Let's step on into this room right here. Okay. All right, come on in. Frankie waits outside the room as I head into the lab with Silver and his two student researchers, Eliza and Fiona. So Fiona will turn towards you and offer to give a hug. So I'll initiate by turning towards you like this. But instead of opening my arms to hug her, I hold them straight up in the air. Then Eliza is going to turn towards you, ask for a hug, and you are going to give Eliza a hug. And the idea here is we're communicating to Frankie that there is an affiliation between you and Eliza. So we're basically trying to convince Frankie that this is your friend. After a few practice rounds, we're ready for Frankie. I wait for Fiona's cue and put my arms up in the air. When Eliza turns towards me, we hug. We do this choreography three times while Silver holds on to Frankie. Then I turn towards the wall. Fiona and Eliza sit on the ground, open their pouches, and hold out dog treats in their hands. Frankie is released. First, he runs up to me. But I have to ignore him. so he paws at my ankles. When Frankie realizes I'm not going to turn towards him, he walks over to Eliza, who I just hugged three times. He takes a treat from her hand, but ignores Fiona. Each time, Frankie leaves the room and comes back in. Frankie's doing a great job so far. After rejecting, giving hugs, and eating treats, the experiment is done. Good job, Frankie. Silver gives us the results. What you saw today, what does it tell you about my relationship with Frankie? Well, it certainly suggests that there's a strong relationship here, that Frankie is using his perception of your other relationships to decide how he wants to form those new ones. So if Frankie didn't care at all about you, he wouldn't care about who you like and don't like either. Even after being released and being able to make choices, Frankie came to you first all four times, only then detoured off to one of the other two people. Like dogs, we also take cues from people we care about to make decisions and choose who's in and who's out. We take shortcuts, and one shortcut that we take is that we use people that we already know and already have a strong opinion of to help us make those future decisions. And whether we're talking about people or dogs, the more we try to understand the beings we love, the better. I've always loved dogs on a personal level, and being able to do work that helps me understand them better in hopes that we can then give them the best possible lives feels really important to me, not just because I love dogs, but also that I want dogs to have a great life and to have the best possible relationship they can have with their people. The kind of symbiotic relationship that says, it's not that I need you, it's more like, I want you. And I want to share my life with you. We could survive without dogs and dogs could survive without us, but together we're able to accomplish much more. That's what feels like love to me. I'm True Quinn, reporting from Los Angeles. Who's counting us down? You are. You are. One, two, three. Frankie! Frankie, welcome. Thanks so much for coming, Frankie. It was so nice to meet you. Hope you enjoyed the science. Tomorrow, we're releasing our third and final episode of The Science of Love. We'll be exploring the science behind our love of stuff. When customers love a brand, they are willing to go out of their way to find it. They're willing to pay more for it. If there's a problem, they're willing to forgive the brand. Our love of the natural world. Caring for the earth is caring for ourselves. Grief. You can't really talk about grief without talking about love. And the love we feel for our wider communities. It's that connection and that feeling and that love of humanity generally which leads us to want to help people who are different from us. Join me, Gina Davis, tomorrow on The Science of Happiness. Thank you for exploring these many forms of love with us. This special is dedicated to the loving memory of radio producer Ben Manila. The Science of Love is a production of the Science of Happiness podcast at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. Our executive producer and editor is Shuka Kalantari. Our senior producer and co-editor is Kate Parkinson-Morgan. Sound design and production by Jenny Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Our reporter is Truk Nguyen. Associate producers are Emily Brower and Tarani Kakar. Fact-checked by Dr. Eli Sussman. Funding for this special was provided by the John Templeton Foundation as part of the Greater Good Science Center's Spreading Love Through the Media Initiative. From PRX.
