Abstract
Romantic love is a complex feeling typically directed towards a single person, involving erotic, cognitive, emotional and behavioral components. These components and the strong relationships between them are difficult to describe separately. This difficulty is a key consideration for animal research models and human studies alike. Taken individually, each of the cognitive processes can be related to analog processes in other organisms, which serve as the starting point for the study of the neurobiology of love. This review adopts a view based on the neuroendocrine factors associated with the cognitive processes involved in romantic love. The neuroanatomical regions involved are discussed in the context of neurotransmitter and receptor density, and of activation patterns triggered by different stimuli detected by means of functional imaging.
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