Romance and Sex in Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood

Risks and Opportunities

Ann C. Crouter, Alan Booth

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135603557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this volume, Romance and Sex in Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: Risks and Opportunities, top scholars in the field of family research examine the nature and origin of adolescents' contemporary patterns of sexual and romantic relationships, spanning such diverse topics as the evolutionary roots of these behaviors, as well as policies and programs that represent best practices for addressing these issues in schools and communities. The text offers interdisciplinary expertise from scholars of psychology, social work, sociology, demography, economics, human development and family studies, and public policy.Adolescents and young adults today face very different choices about family formation than did their parents' generation, given such societal changes as the rise in cohabitation, the increase in divorce rates, and families having fewer children. These demographic trends are linked in important ways and provide a backdrop against which adolescents and emerging adults form and maintain romantic and sexual relationships. Editors Crouter and Booth address such questions as:
*What are the ways in which early family and peer relationships give rise to romantic relationships in the late adolescent and early adult years?
*How do early romantic and sexual relationships influence individuals' subsequent development and life choices, including family formation?
*To what extent are current trends in romantic and sexual relationships in adolescence and emerging adulthood problematic for individuals, families, and communities, and what are the most effective ways to address these issues at the level of practice, program, and policy? Romance and Sex in Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: Risks and Opportunities is an enlightening compilation of essays for academicians and upper-lever undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of human development and family studies, sociology, and psychology, as well as for practitioners in those fields who work with families and adolescents. The chapters are accessible to a wide variety of audiences.

I
What Are the Evolutionary Origins of Contemporary Patterns of Sexual and Romantic Relationships? Where Does Evolution Leave Off and Where Do History and Culture Begin?

1
Broken Hearts: The Nature and Risks of Romantic Rejection

Helen Fisher
Rutgers University

"Oh, tell me the truth about love," poet W. H. Auden wrote. Poems, dramas, novels, songs, stories, myths, legends, and men and women around the world have attempted to describe love. The earliest love poems come from ancient Sumeria some 4,000 years ago (Wolkstein, 1991). But our forebears probably mused about love since they evolved the rudiments of language and spoke across their campfires over a million years ago. Love means many different things to many different people. But this multi-faceted experience is becoming understood.

Neuroscientists currently believe that the basic human emotions and motivations arise from distinct circuits or systems of neural activity (Davidson, 1994; Panksepp, 1998). Among these neural systems, humanity has evolved three distinctly different yet interrelated brain systems for courtship, mating, reproduction, and parenting (Fisher, 1998). These are lust, romantic love, and male/female attachment.

Lust, characterized by the craving for sexual gratification, is associated primarily with the androgens in both men and women (Edwards & Booth, 1994; Sherwin, 1994; Van Goozen et al., 1997). Studies of human sexual arousal that use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) show that specific networks of brain activation are associated with the sex drive (Arnow et al., 2002; Beauregard, Levesque, & Bourgouin, 2001; Karama et al., 2002).

Romantic love, characterized by elation, heightened energy, mood swings, focused attention, obsessive thinking, craving for emotional union with a beloved, goal-oriented behaviors, and intense motivation to win a preferred mating partner, is associated primarily with dopaminergic pathways in the reward system of the brain (Aron et al., 2004; Bartels & Zeki, 2000, 2004; Fisher et al., 2003).

Male/female attachment (or companionate love), characterized by the maintenance of proximity, affiliative gestures, and expressions of calm and contentment when in social contact with a long-term mating partner and "separation anxiety" when apart, is associated with the neuropeptides, oxytocin and vasopressin, and related brain systems (Carter, 1992; Carter et al., 1997; Lim, Murphy, & Young, 2004; Lim & Young, 2004; Pitkow et al., 2001; Young, Wang, & Insel, 1998; Young et al., 1999).

Each primary brain system for loving—lust, romantic love and attachment— produces a different constellation of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Each evolved to play a different role in courtship, mating, reproduction, and parenting (Fisher, 1998; Fisher et al., 2002a; Fisher et al., 2002b; Fisher, 2004). The sex drive evolved to motivate our ancestors to seek coitus with a range of partners. Romantic love evolved to motivate individuals to select among potential mates, prefer a particular individual, and focus their courtship attention on this favored mating partner, thereby conserving precious courtship time and energy. The brain system for male/female attachment evolved primarily to enable our forebears to sustain this affiliative connection long enough to rear a single child through infancy together (Fisher, 1992).

In this chapter I discuss the most powerful of these three neural systems— romantic love. I illustrate some of the ways in which romantic love interacts with feelings of lust and attachment, and explore the biology, feelings, adaptive functions, and risks of a broken heart.

Almost no one in the world escapes the craving, depression, fear, and rage that rejection can create (Baumeister & Dhavale, 2001). Among college students at Case Western Reserve, 93% of both sexes reported having been spurned by someone they adored. Moreover, 95% said they had rejected someone who was deeply in love with them (Baumeister, Wotman, & Stillwell, 1993). Through an understanding of the biology of romantic love, the range of psychophysiological feelings associated with romantic rejection and the possible ways to alleviate the pain of spurned passion, educators, parents, and friends can help teenagers and young adults cope with this painful and dangerous experience—lost love.

Romantic Love: Psychophysiological Properties

Intense attraction, commonly known as romantic love, is recorded in all human societies for which data are available (Jankowiak & Fischer, 1992). This experience is associated with a specific constellation of emotions and motivations (Fisher 1998, 2004; Harris, 1995; Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986; Tennov, 1979).

Romantic love begins as an individual comes to regard another as special, even unique. As a love-stricken American man remarked, "The world has a new center and that center is Maryanne." The lover then intensely focuses his/her attention on this preferred individual, aggrandizing and adoring the beloved's good traits and overlooking or minimizing their flaws. Characteristically, the lover also experiences extreme energy, hyperactivity, sleeplessness, euphoria, mood swings, goal-oriented behaviors, and a strong motivation to win the beloved. Adversity heightens their passion. This is known as the "Romeo and Juliet Effect" or "frustration attraction" (Fisher, 2004). Lovers become emotionally dependent on the relationship; many experience separation anxiety; many reorder their daily priorities to remain in contact with their sweetheart; most feel a powerful sense of empathy for their amour; and many report that they would even die for their beloved. A striking property of romantic love is "intrusive thinking"—the smitten lover thinks obsessively about the beloved. Most important, the lover craves emotional union with his/her sweetheart. And although the love-stricken individual feels intense sexual desire for their special other, as well as intense possessiveness of him or her, the lover's craving for emotional union takes precedence over their longing for sexual contact. Last, romantic passion is involuntary and difficult, even impossible, to control.

This constellation of psychophysiological traits suggests that romantic love is associated with many brain systems. However, two neurotransmitters may be primary contributors—elevated activity of dopamine and decreased activity of serotonin—largely because these monoamines, in particular concentrations, produce many of the above traits associated with romantic love (Fisher, 1998).

Elevated activity of central dopamine has been associated with focused attention, extreme energy, hyperactivity, sleeplessness, elation, mood swings, craving, emotional dependence, goal-oriented behaviors, and strong motivation to pursue and win a preferred reward (Abbott, 2002; Colle & Wise, 1988; Kiyatkin, 1995; Post, Weiss, & Pert, 1988; Robbins & Everitt, 1996; Salamone, 1996; Schultz, Dayan, & Montague, 1997; Wise, 1988,1996), All of these traits are characteristic of romantic love.

Low activity of central serotonin is most likely also involved, because obsessive thinking is central to the experience of being in love and obsessive thinking is currently thought to be due to decreased activity of this neurotransmitter (Flament, Rapoport, & Berg, 1985; Hollander et al., 1988; Thoren, Asberg, & Bertilsson, 1980).

So I have hypothesized that romantic love is associated with elevated activities of central dopamine and decreased activity of central serotonin (Fisher, 1998). "Being in love" takes a variety of graded forms, however, ranging from romantic love that is returned to unrequited love. These gradations of romantic attraction are most likely associated with vaiying ratios of dopamine and serotonin, as well as many other brain systems (Fisher, 1998, 2004; Fisher et al., 2002).

Brain Scanning Studies of Romantic Love

Recent data indicate that at least one of these neurotransmitters, dopamine, is involved in romantic love.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Fisher and colleagues Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Arthur Aron, a research psychologist at State University of New York at Stony Brook; and others studied the brain activity of seven men and ten women who had "just fallen madly in love"(Aron et al., in preparation; Fisher et al., 2003). Participants reported being in love an average of 7.4 months (median = 7; range 1-17 months); they ranged in age from 18 to 26.

The experiment consisted of four tasks. Each subject looked at a photograph of his/her beloved, as well as the photograph of an emotionally-neutral acquaintance, inter-spersed with a "distraction task". The distraction task consisted of looking at a large number, such as 8,241, and (beginning with this number) counting backwards in increments of seven. This task was designed to wash the mind clean of all emotion between looking at the positive and neutral stimuli. Hence the protocol consisted of (1) positive stimulus (30 seconds); (2) distraction task (40 seconds); (3) neutral stimulus (30 seconds); and (4) distraction task (20 seconds). This process (or its reverse) was repeated six times; the experiment lasted about 12 minutes.

The results indicated that central dopamine is associated with feelings of romantic passion.

When looking at the positive image (the beloved), subjects showed increased activity in many brain regions. Most pertinent, however, was activity in the right ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the midbrain and several regions of the caudate nucleus. The VTA is rich in cells that produce and distribute dopamine to many brain areas, including the caudate nucleus. Moreover, the VTA is part of the brain's "reward system" (Breiter et al., 2001; Fiorillo, Tobler, & Schultz, 2003; Martin-Soelch et al., 2001; Schultz, 2000; Schultz et al., 1997; Volkow et al., 1997; Wise, 1996), the network that controls general arousal, sensations of pleasure, focused attention and motivation to pursue and acquire rewards (Delgado et al., 2000; Elliot et al., 2003; Gold, 2003; Schultz, 2000).

The caudate nucleus is also associated with motivation and goal-oriented behaviors and is central to the reward system. The caudate plays a role in reward detection and expectation, the representation of goals, and the integration of sensory inputs to prepare for action to win a reward (Martin-Soelch et al., 2001; Schultz, 2000). Some 80% of receptor sites for dopamine reside in the caudate nucleus.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Bartels and Zeki also investigated brain activity in seventeen young men and women who reported being "truly, deeply, and madly in love" (Bartels & Zeki, 2000, p. 3829). Eleven were women; all looked at a photograph of their beloved and photos of three friends of similar age, sex, and length of friendship. In this study, individuals were in love an average of 2.3 years, however. Thus, the love relationships of these individuals were considerably longer than the love relationships in the study by Fisher and colleagues. These individuals were also less intensely in love (Aron et al., in preparation). This was established because both groups of subjects were administered the same questionnaire prior to scanning, the Passionate Love Scale (Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986).

In spite of these differences in protocol, Bartels and Zeki (2000, 2004) also found that feelings of romantic love were associated with a region of the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental area (as well as several other brain regions).

These data support the hypothesis that mesolimbic dopamine pathways in the reward system of the brain play a central role in the euphoria, mood swings, energy, sleeplessness, focused attention, emotional dependence, craving, motivation, and goal-oriented behaviors associated with romantic love (Fisher, 1998).

A recent study also supports the hypothesis that decreased activity of central serotonin is associated with the obsessive thinking so characteristic of romantic love. In this experiment 20 men and women who had fallen in love in the previous six months, 20 who suffered from unmedicated obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and 20 normal (control) individuals who were not in love were tested for concentrations of serotonin transporters in blood platelets (Marazziti et at, 1999). Both the in-love participants and those suffering from OCD had significantly lower concentrations of platelet serotonin transporters than did the controls. Thus, it is likely that...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• I What Are the Evolutionary Origins of Contemporary Patterns of Sexual and Romantic Relationships? Where Does Evolution Leave Off and Where Do History and Culture Begin?
• II How Do Early Family and Peer Relationships Give Rise to the Quality of Romantic Relationships in Adolescence and Young Adulthood?
• III How Do Early Romantic and Sexual Relationships Influence People Contemporaneously and Later in Life?
• IV To What Extent Are Current Trends in Sexual and Romantic Relationships Problematic for Individuals, Families, and Society? What Are Effective Intervention Approaches at the Level of Practice, Program, and Policy?
• Author Index
• Subject Index