Love is an essential biological, psychological, sociological, and religious phenomenon. Using various conceptual models, philosophers have often distinguished between different types of love, such as self-love, romantic love, friendship love, love of God, and neighborly love. Psychologists and neuroscientists on the other hand have thus far focused predominantly on understanding the emotions and behavioral and neural mechanisms associated with romantic love and parental love. We do not yet know how the models construed by philosophers are related to actual experiences of (...) love, and to which extent they are merely nominal creations connecting phenomena that in fact have little to do with each other. We lack empirical knowledge of how different types of love are experienced as embodied feelings, and how these experiences are related to one another. Here we distinguished between 27 different types of love. Using self-report methods, we measured 1) how subjective feelings of different types of love are topographically embodied; 2) how different types of love are associated with self-reported emotional valence, strength of the bodily and mental experience, association with touch, time elapsed since last experienced, and controllability; and 3) how similar different types of love feel. Our study provides the first mapping of embodied experiences associated with different types of love. The results show that the subjective feelings associated with the love types form a continuum from strongly to weakly felt loves. (shrink)

Empathy is often split into an affective facet for embodied simulation or sometimes sensorial processing, and a cognitive facet for mentalizing and perspective-taking. However, a recent neurophenomenological framework proposes a graded view on empathy (i.e., “Graded Empathy”) that extends this dichotomy and considers multiple levels while integrating complex neural patterns and representations of subjective experience. In the current magnetoencephalography study, we conducted a multidimensional investigation of neural oscillatory modulations and their cortical sources in 44 subjects while observing stimuli that convey (...) vicarious pain (vs no-pain) in a broad time window and frequency range to explore rich neural representations of pain empathy. Furthermore, we collected participants’ subjective-experience of sensitivity to vicarious pain, as well as their self-reported trait levels of affective and cognitive empathy to examine the possible associations between neural mechanisms and subjective experiences and reports. While extending previous electrophysiological studies that mainly focused on alpha suppression, we found here four significant power modulation patterns corresponding to multiple facets of empathy: an early central (peaking in the paracentral sulcus) alpha (6–11 Hz) suppression pattern plausibly reflecting sensory processing, two early beta (15–23 Hz) suppression patterns in the mid-cingulate cortex (plausibly reflecting the affective component) and in the precuneus (plausibly reflecting the cognitive component), and a late anterior (peaking in the orbitofrontal cortex) alpha-beta (11–19 Hz) enhancement pattern (plausibly reflecting cognitive-control inhibitory response). Interestingly, the latter measure was negatively correlated with the subjective sensitivity to vicarious pain, thereby possibly revealing a novel inhibitory neural mechanism determining the subjective sensitivity to vicarious pain. Altogether, these multilevel findings cannot be accommodated by the dichotomous model of empathy (i.e., affective-cognitive), and provide empirical support to theGraded Empathyneurophenomenological framework. Furthermore, this work emphasizes the importance of examining multiple neural rhythms, their cortical generators, and reports of subjective-experience in the aim of elucidating the complex nature of empathy. (shrink)