Measuring the power of different types of love from parent-child to cat lover

Parental love is the most intense and more intense that one's love for a pet by Michael Broad

This is a cross-post from another website of mine. A Finnish study figured out which type of love is the most powerful by MRI scanning participants' brains when they were told stories reflecting different types of love. I'm referring to the following types of love:

• Parents' love of their children
• The love between romantic partners
• The love between close friends
• The love that a pet caregiver has for their companion animal
• The love of a person towards a stranger who needs help and
• The love of nature

Which of these is the most powerful? Which of these forms of love activate most parts of the brain as indicated by the MRI scan? The following is the list in descending order of strength on my reading of the study:

1. Parents' love their children comes top. This type of love activated more parts of the brain than the other forms of love. In parental love there was a deep activation in the brain's reward system, in the striatum area, while imagining love. This was not seen in any other type of love.
2. The second most potent form of love was romantic love which is also strongly activated part of the brain relating to reward, attachment and motivation.
3. The third most powerful form of love is found between the love of friends.
4. The fourth most powerful type of love is one's love of a companion animal.
5. And the fifth is the love of a stranger that requires help in a compassionate act which some participants questioned whether this was indeed an act of love. There was much less brain activity in this kind of love.
6. On a par with the love of a stranger requiring help, or higher is the love of nature which activated very different brain regions "that were absent for interpersonal love" causing activity in areas unrelated to social skills. People need to connect with nature to feel healed (my personal viewpoint).

The study demonstrated the wide range of the concepts of love and its complexity.

Comment: I have said this before, I think it is a little dangerous to generalise as this study has done because you will find many instances of independent, single people living with companion animals who they love more than anything else in the world and upon whom they rely completely and vice versa.

The study recruited 55 people aged between 28-53. They had at least one child and were in a loving couple relationship. 27 of them had companion animals.

Citation

Pärttyli Rinne, Juha M Lahnakoski, Heini Saarimäki, Mikke Tavast, Mikko Sams, Linda Henriksson, Six types of loves differentially recruit reward and social cognition brain areas, Cerebral Cortex, Volume 34, Issue 8, August 2024, bhae331, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhae331

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins. Also: sources for news articles are carefully selected but the news is often not independently verified. Also, I rely on scientific studies but they are not 100% reliable.