One more proof that the physical is not everything at the level of attraction. A new study carried out by the department of Affective and Social Neuroscience at the University of Lübeck (Germany) has shown that the brain activates positive reward strategies when it manages to empathize with the feelings of the person with whom it is spoken and hopes to decipher these sensations. The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The importance of empathy
The researchers, led by neuroscience expert Silke Anders, evaluated whether the human brain had mechanisms to approach people whom it can more easily “strip” emotionally. To do this, they carried out several experiments in which they had 92 volunteers who were subjected to MRIs in a series of games . The participants – men – had to guess what feelings the women in the images showed (which they could enlarge and zoom in) and rate with what certainty they believed they were correct.
The results showed that the way of transmitting feelings and perceiving them varied in each person but showed that “ only when emotional signals are sent efficiently, the reward system is triggered – including the right ventral striatum and the orbitofrontal cortex of the brain. -, increasing trust and attraction for the sender ”, explains Anders, leader of the study.
That is, in terms of romantic relationships, people are capable of mutually identifying our emotions thanks to empathy and the neural connections that intervene in this socialization process. According to scientists, the level of attraction increases by correctly understanding the emotional behaviors of the other person.
“This study clarifies the neurobiological processes that could play an important role in the formation and success of human social relationships. The changes in interpersonal attraction during communication depend on the neuronal coincidence of both the sender and the receiver, as well as the confidence they have, individually, that what is decoded is correct ”, Anders explains to the Sinc agency.
