ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2017
Tribal love: the neural correlates of passionate engagement in football fans.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 33 citations in OpenAlex.
- The neuroscience of social feelings: mechanisms of adaptive social functioning.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Pooled it
- Endogenous oxytocin-linked heart-rate synchrony and social connection during live sports spectatorship.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Six types of loves differentially recruit reward and social cognition brain areas.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- The people's game: evolutionary perspectives on the behavioural neuroscience of football fandom.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Effect of Listening Channels for Sport-Event Theme Songs on Willingness to Share.Psychology research and behavior management · 2024Article
- Neural correlates of fanhood: the role of fan identity and team brand strength.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2023Article
- Ventral Caudate and Anterior Insula Recruitment During Value Estimation of Passionate Rewarding Cues.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2020Article
- The role of Prefrontal Cortex in a Battle of the Sexes Dilemma involving a Conflict between Tribal and Romantic love.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Insights From fMRI Studies Into Ingroup Bias.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Review
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The tribal character of the affective link between football fans and their teams is a well-recognized phenomenon. Other forms of love such as romantic or maternal attachment have previously been studied from a neuroimaging point of view. Here we aimed to investigate the neural basis of this tribal form of love, which implies both the feeling of belongingness and rivalry against opposing teams. A pool of 56 participants was submitted to an fMRI experimental design involving the presentation of winning and losing football moments of their loved, rival or neutral teams. We found recruitment of amygdala and reward regions, including the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and substantia nigra (SN), as well as other limbic regions involved in emotional cognition, for 'positive vs neutral' and 'positive vs negative' conditions. The latter contrast was correlated with neuropsychological scores of fanaticism in the amygdala and regions within the reward system, as the VTA and SN. The observation of increased response patterns in critical components of the reward system, in particular for positive content related to the loved team, suggests that this kind of non-romantic love reflects a specific arousal and motivational state, which is biased for emotional learning of positive outcomes.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.