Other researchers have shown that when mice (not known for their monogamous ways), are injected with a gene containing instructions for making the receptor of oxytocin, the mice cozy up to their mates like voles.
Lack of oxytocin is important too. For instance, if female animals are stressed by being isolated, their oxytocin drops. In humans, Emory University research shows that women who were seriously abused as children have low oxytocin levels as adults.
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Choosing partners
One question emerging from all this is whether knowing the chemistry of love can help in picking a compatible partner in the first place.
Fisher, the Rutgers anthropologist, who consults for the dating websites Match.com and an affiliate, Chemistry.com, thinks so. She thinks that certain personality types correspond to the preponderance and ratios of specific chemicals in the body; her team is examining blood, urine and saliva samples to test her theory.
Creative, risk-taking personalities, which she calls "explorers," may have more active dopamine systems, as well as more activity of another brain chemical, norepinephrine, she says. In a study that involved 28,000 people using Chemistry.com Fisher built personality profiles based on people's answers to a long questionnaire. She sorted people into different types and then followed their dating experience to see which types were attracted to which other types.
She found that explorers are particularly drawn to other explorers." People she calls "builders," conventional, calm, conscientious folks, may have more active serotonin and may also be drawn to other builders.
By contrast, Hillary Clinton types -- "directors" -- who are analytical and tough-minded may be high in testosterone and are regularly drawn to their opposites, the "negotiators" like Bill Clinton, who may be fueled by estrogen and oxytocin, Fisher says.
Whether this love chemistry will pan out in the new research is still an open question. In the meantime, remember those prairie voles -- they get what Fisher calls "life's greatest prize -- an enduring mate and partner."
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health@latimes.com
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Love tuneups
Social psychologist Arthur Aron of SUNY Stony Brook, a co-author of the brain scanning studies and other research on love relationships, stresses the value of marriage workshops and couples counseling to enhance love relationships.
In addition, to make a marriage really good, he says:
1. Keep novelty and excitement going. Have a "date night" every week or so. Do novel things -- take a course together, travel, join a new group of friends. (Get that dopamine system, which loves novelty, going again.)
2. Capitalize on the good stuff. If something good happens to your partner, to the extent you can, get sincerely excited about it so you can both enjoy your good fortune.
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Judy Foreman
