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      Event-Related Potential Responses to Beloved and Familiar Faces in Different Marriage Styles: Evidence from Mosuo Subjects

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          Abstract

          Research on familiar face recognition has largely focused on the neural correlates of recognizing a beloved partner or family member. However, no research has explored the effect of marriage style on the recognition of a beloved partner’s face, especially in matriarchal societies. Here, we examined the time course of event-related potentials (ERP) in response to the face of a beloved partner, sibling, or unknown person in a sample of individuals from the matriarchal Mosuo tribe. Two groups were assessed: intermarriage and walking marriage groups (i.e., couples in a committed relationship who do not cohabitate during the daytime). In agreement with previous reports, ERP results revealed more positive VPP, N250, and P300 waveforms for beloved faces than sibling faces in both groups. Moreover, P300 was more positive for beloved partner versus sibling faces; however, this difference emerged at fronto-central sites for the walking marriage group and at posterior sites for the intermarriage group. Overall, we observed that marriage style affects the later stage processing of a beloved partner’s face, and this may be associated with greater affective arousal and familiarity.

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          The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love.

          Romantic and maternal love are highly rewarding experiences. Both are linked to the perpetuation of the species and therefore have a closely linked biological function of crucial evolutionary importance. Yet almost nothing is known about their neural correlates in the human. We therefore used fMRI to measure brain activity in mothers while they viewed pictures of their own and of acquainted children, and of their best friend and of acquainted adults as additional controls. The activity specific to maternal attachment was compared to that associated to romantic love described in our earlier study and to the distribution of attachment-mediating neurohormones established by other studies. Both types of attachment activated regions specific to each, as well as overlapping regions in the brain's reward system that coincide with areas rich in oxytocin and vasopressin receptors. Both deactivated a common set of regions associated with negative emotions, social judgment and 'mentalizing', that is, the assessment of other people's intentions and emotions. We conclude that human attachment employs a push-pull mechanism that overcomes social distance by deactivating networks used for critical social assessment and negative emotions, while it bonds individuals through the involvement of the reward circuitry, explaining the power of love to motivate and exhilarate.
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            Reward, motivation, and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love.

            Early-stage romantic love can induce euphoria, is a cross-cultural phenomenon, and is possibly a developed form of a mammalian drive to pursue preferred mates. It has an important influence on social behaviors that have reproductive and genetic consequences. To determine which reward and motivation systems may be involved, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging and studied 10 women and 7 men who were intensely "in love" from 1 to 17 mo. Participants alternately viewed a photograph of their beloved and a photograph of a familiar individual, interspersed with a distraction-attention task. Group activation specific to the beloved under the two control conditions occurred in dopamine-rich areas associated with mammalian reward and motivation, namely the right ventral tegmental area and the right postero-dorsal body and medial caudate nucleus. Activation in the left ventral tegmental area was correlated with facial attractiveness scores. Activation in the right anteromedial caudate was correlated with questionnaire scores that quantified intensity of romantic passion. In the left insula-putamen-globus pallidus, activation correlated with trait affect intensity. The results suggest that romantic love uses subcortical reward and motivation systems to focus on a specific individual, that limbic cortical regions process individual emotion factors, and that there is localization heterogeneity for reward functions in the human brain.
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              The facilitated processing of threatening faces: an ERP analysis.

              Threatening, friendly, and neutral faces were presented to test the hypothesis of the facilitated perceptual processing of threatening faces. Dense sensor event-related brain potentials were measured while subjects viewed facial stimuli. Subjects had no explicit task for emotional categorization of the faces. Assessing early perceptual stimulus processing, threatening faces elicited an early posterior negativity compared with nonthreatening neutral or friendly expressions. Moreover, at later stages of stimulus processing, facial threat also elicited augmented late positive potentials relative to the other facial expressions, indicating the more elaborate perceptual analysis of these stimuli. Taken together, these data demonstrate the facilitated perceptual processing of threatening faces. Results are discussed within the context of an evolved module of fear (A. Ohman & S. Mineka, 2001). Copyright 2004 American Psychological Association
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                17 February 2016
                2016
                : 7
                : 159
                Affiliations
                [1] 1Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing, China
                [2] 2State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University Beijing, China
                [3] 3School of Education, Guangzhou University Guangzhou, China
                [4] 4Key Laboratory of Exercise and Health Sciences of Ministry of Education, Shanghai University of Sport Shanghai, China
                [5] 5Institute of Educational Psychology and School Counselling, Beijing Normal University Beijing, China
                [6] 6Institute of Affective and Social Neuroscience, College of Psychology and Sociology, Shenzhen University Shenzhen, China
                [7] 7Institute of Neuroscience Shenzhen, China
                Author notes

                Edited by: Zhiling Zou, Southwest University, China

                Reviewed by: Yina Ma, Beijing Normal University, China; Li Hu, Southwest University, China

                *Correspondence: Yue-jia Luo, luoyj@ 123456szu.edu.cn

                This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00159
                4756119
                26925002
                02d085a3-2517-467b-8ff5-5fa1187d8770
                Copyright © 2016 Wu, Luo, Dai, Yang, Wang and Luo.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 16 July 2015
                : 27 January 2016
                Page count
                Figures: 2, Tables: 0, Equations: 0, References: 59, Pages: 8, Words: 0
                Funding
                Funded by: National Natural Science Foundation of China 10.13039/501100001809
                Funded by: National Institutes of Health 10.13039/100000002
                Categories
                Psychology
                Original Research

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                love,affective processing,familiar faces,event-related potentials

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