WIRED.CO.UK – Feb 15 – In the 1960s, a young social psychologist Arthur Aron was carrying out experimental studies using university students, and brain scans on people who were in love, falling out of love and recently divorced. He became famous for his 36 Questions which is a set of very personal questions people work through with their partner to get closer to each other (fall in love). In the original 1997 study, two of the lab technicians who did the experiment eventually got married. "People thought it couldn't be done," says Aron, who is now a researcher at Stonybrook University in New York. In the last 50 years, we've made real scientific progress towards understanding the processes in our brain that give us that giddy feeling. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Indiana University's Kinsey Institute, was one of the first to publish research into the processes behind love – how dopamine courses through your brain, which parts light up. She says that the desire to love is a survival mechanism, one which won't be trampled over so easily by new technology. Others, such as sociologists and critical theorists, also argue that young people now aren't so taken in by the traditional ideas of marriage, or even a cultural emphasis on romantic love. "It's fascinating – people who are now in their late teens, early twenties – they do take love and relationships seriously," says Michael Gratzke, a professor of literature at Hull University. "But they're more comfortable with complicated relationships and patterns of love. A lot of the research into how technology has changed relationships is really only starting to be understood," says Gratzke.
by Sanjana Varghese
See full article at Wired.co.uk
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