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.

Woman who loves cats adopted a rescue cat and learned to hate him

This is a story on social media which tells us that it is possible to love cats in general, to want to adopt a cat and then finally adopt a cat after a long wait when you have your own property but thereafter to learn to hate the cat that you adopted. 

It's a sad story and it is possible sometimes for this to happen. Cat owners need to do a reality check and accept it when they feel that they can no longer live with their cat. That doesn't mean abandoning your cat but it might mean rehoming your cat to the best of your ability because that is part of the obligation of a caregiver.

In this instance, the woman said that she waited for the right one to adopt. She wanted an older cat who would be happy living indoors because she lived on the second floor of a house conversion in a one-bedroom flat without direct access to a garden. In short, she adopted a cat to be a full-time indoor cats.

But she found that her elderly male cat screamed at 3 AM in the morning until 6 AM in the morning every night. She had no idea why this was happening. She took her cat to the vet who gave him arthritis injections because they thought that he was suffering from arthritis causing pain. He obviously wasn't. Because the screaming continued.

She got to the point where she couldn't function any more at work because she couldn't sleep properly and she learned to hate him and sought advice on the Internet.

In follow-up posts she said that on third visit to a veterinarian they diagnosed megacolon. And because her cat suffered from megacolon, they decided that it was the reason why he was screaming during the night. I doubt that. 

That might have been one reason but the thing is this: the symptoms of megacolon of very specific and quite apparent and the lady never mentions these symptoms which are: straining to defecate, weight loss, lethargy, vomiting and anorexia i.e. a lack of appetite. And a painful abdomen as well as dehydration and depression.

I would have thought she would have had picked up these symptoms if they truly were present and that her cat was indeed suffering from megacolon. He might have been but I think the more likely reason why he was screaming at night was because this cat, historically, was an indoor/outdoor cat with free access to the outside unsupervised. Keeping him indoors full-time drove him nuts. He screamed at the top of his voice as a consequence. He was asking to be let out.

But the lady couldn't do it because she lived on the second floor and there was no access to the outside. The answer would have been to rehome the him but almost all of the very many people who advised didn't advise this. 

In the end she decided to euthanise her cat because the operation to fix the megacolon was going to be too expensive and perhaps too difficult. And the outcome was uncertain. She said that she he had five good months with her as the vet had administered medications for the megacolon and Feliway to calm him. I don't think the five months were that good. The Feliway indicates that he was agitated by being kept indoors.

I feel a little bit queasy about the story because, as mentioned, I think the underlying and genuine reason why this cat was screaming is because he wanted to be outside, to hunt at night, to roam freely as he had done before. I am guessing but the story indicates that.

To keep cats indoors full-time is a good thing sometimes because it protects wildlife and protects the cat from risk of injury and more severe harm. But sometimes cat caregivers have to accept that their cat is an indoor/outdoor cat. They have to accept that their cat is going to live a risky life relative to being an indoor life. 

People normally keep their cats indoors full-time for their own peace of mind primarily and the secondary reason is to keep their cat safe. I think people need to free up that thought and sometimes, just sometimes, they have to allow their cat to take life risks and decide that what happens is going to happen come what may.

If she decided that and found a way to allow her cat to go outside at night he might be alive today.