ReviewBrain sciences2022
The Neurobiological Basis of Love: A Meta-Analysis of Human Functional Neuroimaging Studies of Maternal and Passionate Love.
Review in Brain sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- The convergent neuroscience of Christian prayer and attachment relationships in the context of mental health: a systematic review.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Romantic love as regulatory co-option of maternal-bonding circuitry: a testable genetic account.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Advances in Neuroimaging and Deep Learning for Emotion Detection: A Systematic Review of Cognitive Neuroscience and Algorithmic Innovations.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- We know more and less about love: a comment on Babková and Repiská (2025).Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Underexplored Connections Between Diabetes, Hypomanic States and Insecure Attachment.Psychology research and behavior management · 2025Review
- Six types of loves differentially recruit reward and social cognition brain areas.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Romantic Love and Behavioral Activation System Sensitivity to a Loved One.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Review
- Romantic love evolved by co-opting mother-infant bonding.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Neuroimaging of human and non-human animal emotion and affect in the context of social relationships.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Maternal and passionate love are both crucial for reproduction and involve attachment behaviors with high rewards. Neurobiological studies of attachment in animal and human neuroimaging studies have suggested that the coordination of oxytocinergic and vasopressinergic pathways, coupled with the dopaminergic reward system, contribute to the formation and maintenance of maternal and passionate love. In the present study, we carried out a quantitative meta-analysis of human neuroimaging to identify common and dissociable neural substrates associated with maternal and passionate love, using the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) approach. The ALE results showed significant activation of the brain regions in the left ventral tegmental area (VTA), right thalamus, left substantia nigra, and the left putamen for maternal love, but in the bilateral VTA for passionate love. The meta-analytic neuroimaging evidence suggests the greater involvement of cognitive-affective regulation in maternal attachment and the greater desire to combine liking and wanting in romantic love behaviors. The conjunction analysis highlights the functional convergence of the VTA across the two types of human love, indicating a shared neurobiological mechanism of maternal and passionate love with evolutionary roots. Our findings suggest that the processing of both maternal and passionate love involve the affective and motivational regulation associated with dopaminergic systems; our neuroimaging evidence supports the notion that maternal and passionate love share a common evolutionary origin and neurobiological basis in the human brain.
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Registered trials
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.