Scroll down for a transcription of this episode.
Guest host Geena Davis guides us through the research on love that stretches beyond romance and friendship, showing up in our bonds with objects, nature, grief, and the collective moments that connect us to something larger than ourselves.
Summary: In this final episode of our 3-part series on The Science of Love, researchers reveal how love expands our sense of self and strengthens our bond to humanity. We also explore why objects can feel meaningful, how love of nature can motivate care for the planet, he ways grief reshapes our capacity for connection, and our love of humanity.
Related The Science of Happiness episodes:
The Science of Love Series: https://bit.ly/TheScienceofLove
The Science of Love, with Geena Davis (Episode 1): https://tinyurl.com/bfave5wd
How 7 Days Can Transform Your Relationship: https://tinyurl.com/bdh2ezhr
Related Happiness Breaks:
Visualizing Your Best Self in Relationships: https://tinyurl.com/4797z2vf
A Guided Meditation on Embodied Love: https://tinyurl.com/3dmpfam6
A Meditation on Love and Interconnectedness: https://tinyurl.com/ye6baxv3
Today’s Guests:
AARON AHUVIA is the most widely published and cited academic expert on non-interpersonal love.
Learn more about Aaron Ahuvia here: https://thethingswelove.com/about-aaron/
JESSICA EISE is a social and environmental scientist and is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health with Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington.
Learn more about Jessica Eise here: https://jessicaeise.com/
YURIA CELIDWEN is an indigenous scholar of contemplative studies, and author of the new book, Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Foundations For Collective Well-Being.
Learn more about Yuria Celidwen here: https://www.yuriacelidwen.com/
MARY-FRANCES O'CONNOR is a psychologist and professor at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Grief, Loss, and Social Stress Lab.
Learn more about Mary-Frances O’connor here: https://maryfrancesoconnor.org/
SHIRA GABRIEL is a Professor of Psychology at SUNY, University at Buffalo.
Learn more about Shira Gabriel here: https://tinyurl.com/2vvav8xj
Message us or leave a comment on Instagram @scienceofhappinesspod. E-mail us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or use the hashtag #happinesspod.
Help us share The Science of Happiness! Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap
Funding for this special was provided by the John Templeton Foundation, as part of the Greater Good Science Center's Spreading Love Through the Media initiative.
Transcription:
DACHER KELTNER: I'm Dacher Keltner, and welcome to the third and final episode of The Science of Love, a series from the Science of Happiness. Hosted by Geena Davis, we explore the science of how love moves outward from the things we cherish to the natural world and the love that unites communities.
(“I Wanna Be Loved by You” plays)
GEENA DAVIS: Hi, I'm Geena Davis and you are listening to The Science of Love, a special series by the Science of Happiness Podcast. This is our third and final episode in the series. I encourage you to go back and listen to the first two if you haven't yet.
We talked about love in its endless forms between family to friends, romance, and even our love for our pets. Today we're talking about the type of love that only takes one heart to experience, like our love of stuff.
UNKNOWN SPEAKER 1: Most of the things people love are things that connect them to other people.
GEENA DAVIS: Our love of nature,
UNKNOWN SPEAKER 2: Caring for the earth is caring for ourselves.
GEENA DAVIS: Love that endures through grief and beyond our inner circles to our greater communities and even humanity.
UNKNOWN SPEAKER 3: If we are not thinking about the collective, if we're not thinking about how we all make things better for each other, then we've missed an opportunity.
GEENA DAVIS: More science of love after this break.
(Ad plays)
GEENA DAVIS: Welcome back to The Science of Love, a special by the Science of Happiness podcast. I'm Geena Davis. So far on our Science of Love special, we've been talking about love of sentient beings, but what about inanimate objects? People say they love their stuff, but do we really love it?
AARON AHUVIA: Most of the things people love are things that connect them to other people.
GEENA DAVIS: Aaron Avia is a marketing professor at the University of Michigan. He studies how and why we love objects and activities.
AARON AHUVIA: So, maybe you love a photograph of another person or a souvenir of some experience you had with another person. Or maybe you love the dishes that you use at dinner parties because of the way they connect you to other people.
GEENA DAVIS: But can we actually love objects in the same way that we love people?
AARON AHUVIA: It's a little bit odd in a way that we can love things that aren't people, because the brain actually evolved with mechanisms that go out of their way to keep us from forming emotional attachments to things that aren't people.
GEENA DAVIS: That's because social coordination with people was vital to our early human survival, but our brains have developed different ways to overcome this. For example, anthropomorphic thinking — When we treat an object like a person because it looks or acts like one. This could be one explanation for why people are reporting to fall in love with AI chatbots.
AARON AHUVIA: People who have not had the experience of forming social relations, romantic relationships, friendships with chat bots generally say, “Oh, if I were to talk to this robot, I wouldn't feel anything. 'Cause I know it's not a person.” But what they don't recognize is that the part of your brain that causes those emotional reactions is unconscious.
GEENA DAVIS: Our love of objects can also be tied to our identities.
AARON AHUVIA: There have been really quite a few studies where they've put people into brain scanners and looked at what's going on in the brain when a person thinks about a person that they love, and when they think about an object that they love or a brand that they love or possession. And some parts of the brain where you think about yourself are also the same parts that you use when you think about people that you love and when you think about objects that you love. At quite a literal level, when you love something, you are making it part of who you are.
GEENA DAVIS: And brands know all about this.
AARON AHUVIA: So you get a lot of brands, that, we call it badge value. “Because I use this brand, I'm a certain kind of person. I'm a Ford F-150 person. I'm Birkenstocks person.”
GEENA DAVIS: Also, when customers love a brand, they're willing to go out of their way to find it.
AARON AHUVIA: They're willing to pay more for it. If there's a problem, they're willing to forgive the brand. And you see that with Apple, Nike, Lululemon, and many other brands that are really successful with this,
GEENA DAVIS: But Ahuvia says the top things people say they love are things you just can't put a price on — like our pets and the natural world around us.
AARON AHUVIA: And in the case of nature, I think it's because it's something we all have in common.
GEENA DAVIS: Nature might be common ground, but does that mean that we can actually love nature? In the early 1980s, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson popularized the hypothesis known as biophilia — the idea that we all have an innate tendency to connect with the natural world and all living species.
Reporter Kate Parkinson Morgan traveled to Bloomington, Indiana to investigate the latest research about our connection to nature and how the strength of that connection might shape our future.
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: It's a crisp autumn afternoon, and I'm watching a 4-year-old zip line through the woods.
JESSICA EIES: Wow. You're really going, wow!
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: I'm here with social scientist Jessica Eies, who's picking up her sons, ages two and four, from a nature daycare that's also a farm.
JESSICA EIES: Hi, little guys. Did you guys go out into the forest today?
CHILD: Yeah!
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: At nearly six acres, the farm backs onto a forest, so all day, the kids do activities like climb trees, care for the farm animals, and forage for wild edibles. Research shows that parents' own connection to nature, strongly influences how connected their children feel to the natural world. And numerous studies have found that being in nature is good for our health — it improves our overall wellbeing, reduces stress, and helps us feel a greater sense of connectedness to others and the world around us. Which is why Eise loves to talk about the wonders of nature with her boys.
JESSICA EIES: Can you feel that the tree's alive? If you touch it, can you feel that there's life inside it?
CHILD: Mm-hmm.
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: Another reason is that Eise knows how much our feelings about nature affect our ability to protect it. It's what she studies as a social scientist.
JESSICA EIES: I try to understand how people relate to the earth, and how we can solve really tough challenges we face, like climate change, food insecurity, and other environmental crises.
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: At Indiana University, Eies is leading ongoing studies looking at how our beliefs and values — things like spirituality, ethics, and morality — can shape the way we act on issues like climate change.
JESSICA EIES: We know how to solve climate change from a scientific perspective. What we don't know how to solve is human behavior.
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: In one study, Eise’s team asked around 300 people open-ended questions about how they felt about the environment. Things like, “What's your personal relationship to nature?”
JESSICA EIES: The primary feeling was love. The second feeling was longing. And then, that was followed by a feeling of worry and guilt. The love is so much more powerful than the guilt and the fear, but right now, I don't think we're acting on our love for the earth because the message we've been using for so long is the least motivating message. Messages about ice caps melting, polar bears, dying species being driven to extinction.
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: So what does her research say is the most motivating message?
JESSICA EIES: Everyone and everything on earth is connected. Caring for the earth is caring for ourselves. The concept of care is the most motivating message. And care is a foundation of love.
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: Neuroscience backs this up — feeling love deactivates neural pathways for negative emotions like fear and judgment.
JESSICA EIES: And if we shift that messaging towards a love-based message system around climate issues, that builds in us a brain elasticity, a physiological ability to respond better to social challenges.
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: Including political challenges. Eise’s research shows our love of nature transcends party lines.
JESSICA EIES: Republicans, Democrats, moms, hunters, students — they're tearing up talking about these issues and I think, “Wow, if I could just bottle up all this love that all these different people feel and just help them have a channel for it. To release it in a way that taps into what's good in us and not what is hateful in us.” We're so entrenched in minutia. These little differences that we feel towards issues that we overlook, the most fundamental part, which is that we love the earth and we can unite around that.
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: I'm Kate Parkinson Morgan reporting from Bloomington, Indiana.
YURIA CELIDWEN: There needs to be really legally binding agreements that push governments to really commit to changes for the health of water bodies, the health of life on earth, the health of forests, et cetera.
GEENA DAVIS: Yuria Celidwen has spent years working within the United Nations to advance both indigenous people's rights and the rights of nature.
YURIA CELIDWEN: We need to stop thinking that each state or each country, each government is on their own, and rather start thinking of all of us as part of a global community of a planetary community.
GEENA DAVIS: Celidwen is from the Nahua and Mayan lineages, born and raised in the highlands of Chiapas in Mexico. She says one reason indigenous communities are at the forefront of environmental movements is that they experience nature as more than just a resource.
YURIA CELIDWEN: For many, if not all, of indigenous cultures of the world there is a very similar view on seeing the natural universe as kin, as relatives. So when we are raised in a cultural context that embraces this constant interconnectedness with the natural environment, then we are constantly paying attention to how we are impacting this environment.
We, as a planetary community need to really embrace, really integrate in our understanding of the world that the whole universe is alive, that water is alive. That the whole natural environment is a living entity that is speaking to us, speaking through us, because it always inhabits us.
GEENA DAVIS: Coming up next, we learn how love endures through grief, how it can expand our sense of self and belonging and the love we feel for our wider communities.
UNKNOWN SPEAKER: It's that connection and that feeling and that love of humanity generally, which leads us to wanna help people who are different from us.
GEENA DAVIS: I'm Geena Davis. More science of love after this break.
(Ad plays)
GEENA DAVIS: I am Geena Davis. Welcome back to The Science of Love, a special by the Science of Happiness Podcast.
DACHER KELTNER: Loving nature, it's a big idea. I remember when I was about 11, we had five acres out on the foothills of the Sierras, and I used to go sit on this granite rock and just listen to the birds sing
GEENA DAVIS: That’s psychologist Dacker Keltner, a professor at UC Berkeley and host of the Science of Happiness podcast. Kate Parkinson Morgan reports on how grief transforms the way we love and how rituals can help us process loss.
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: Keltner and I are walking on a muddy trail in the Berkeley Hills where fog creeps around dense groves of eucalyptus trees.
DACHER KELTNER: I turned to this trail for a year and a half or so while my brother had colon cancer, and then for a year or two after he passed away. It was just this sense of being in a landscape that reminded me of him, and it kept him alive.
MARY-FRANCES O’CONNOR: You can't really talk about grief without talking about love.
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: Psychologist Mary-Frances O'Connor is a professor at the University of Arizona. She studies what happens to us when we grieve.
MARY-FRANCES O’CONNOR: Grief often is experienced as love with nowhere to go. We still have all of those continuing bonds with this person who we carry in our brain and in our heart. And because we loved this person, our physiology has changed.
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: O'Connor says that grieving is a form of learning.
MARY-FRANCES O’CONNOR: And what I mean by that is we have to understand every habit that was responding to our loved one. The way you choose groceries because you know that your loved one likes to eat those things, or the way you pick up the phone when something good happens or something bad happens, and so there's learning how to be without that person.
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: That can take time. Our brains have to change to accommodate the loss.
MARY-FRANCES O’CONNOR: There is a part of the brain that is related to yearning, predicting that we will see our loved one again, wanting them to be with us.
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: This part of the brain is called the nucleus accumbens, and it's associated with motivation and reward seeking.
MARY-FRANCES O’CONNOR: So, we yearn for our loved one because that wanting motivates us to reach out to them, to be with them. And being with them is rewarding.
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: The grieving process can take a toll on our bodies too.
MARY-FRANCES O’CONNOR: Our cardiovascular system is tethered to the external pacemakers that are our relationships. When a loved one dies, that pacemaker is ripped away from us. In the first 24 hours after the death of a loved one, we're 21 times more likely to have a heart attack than any other day of our life, which is an absolutely shocking statistic. Eventually, as we learn, day after painful day, we come to recognize that we can't expect them anymore. This change in the brain isn't about forgetting them. It is about overcoming our brain's belief that they will always be there, which takes a very long time to truly understand.
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: One way to process the loss while honoring our loved ones is through memorials, or rituals to mark birthdays or other major holidays.
MARY-FRANCES O’CONNOR: I think of the body as a container that absorbs our reactions that we're having emotionally and mentally. I think of our culture, sometimes our religion, sometimes just rituals we create as an even bigger container that gives us some sense of context. Where are we in time? How long has it been? What are we feeling now that is different from what we felt when he first died? Rituals can connect us with this universal nature of grief.
DACHER KELTNER: The grief of losing my brother, my turning to this trail, it became a ritual.
KATE PARKINSON MORGAN: Back on the trail in the Berkeley Hills, Keltner tells me he used to walk this path every day at dusk.
DACHER KELTNER: And then the light would shine on the fall grasses or on the tree. My brother had this really interesting red hair, and the dusk light was very much like the color of his hair, and I just was like, “Whoa, there he is.” It was like, he's here with me, you know? And I believe that. I believe that he's in my cells and he's in my consciousness and experiences.
When you really love the person, the grief offers up opportunities for awe and growth and discovery and, and of course, pain and deep sadness. But sadness is full of wisdom. And I found for me, Kate, like the grief opened me up to humility and a deeper love of humanity, you know? Wow, humans we're so vulnerable and we're so tender, you know, and we're so, we're trying hard.
GEENA DAVIS: This deeper love of humanity, the kind that can emerge from our hardest moments, can also surface during times of celebration and joy. Across the country, in a busy public library in New York City, a community is hosting a festival that brings that celebratory spirit to life, Shuka Kalantari reports.
UNKNOWN VOICE: Take one step back.
SHUKA KALANTARI: The festival is inside a three story public library in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. On one floor, a group of neighborhood kids are learning Ukrainian and Russian folk dancing.
(Russian tap dancing music plays)
UNKNOWN VOICE: Very good. Time to dance with your friends, right?
SHUKA KALANTARI: There's live jazz music on another floor.
(Jazz music plays)
SHUKA KALANTARI: Neighborhood vendors are serving dumplings and flautas, a nod to Sunset park's large Chinese and Mexican communities. Alexis Cariello and her son Nico are here.
ALEXIS CARIELLO (addressing someone): Where are the books? Hello? Okay, appreciate you!
SHUKA KALANTARI: You may remember Cariello, if you heard the first episode of this three part special. She's the one who wrote a lullaby for Nico when she was pregnant with him.
ALEXIS CARIELLO (singing): I trust you, you know…
SHUKA KALANTARI: She brought her son to the festival tonight so he could feel the collective care of their Brooklyn community.
ALEXIS CARIELLO: Whatever happens, I just want him to feel loved, but I also want everyone else in his life and our life to feel love. And, so, he has to believe that also to then, like, put that love out into the world.
SHIRA GABRIEL: When we all think about love and connection, we think about the friends that we have, we think about our family members, we think about our romantic connections, and those are real, and those are so important.
SHUKA KALANTARI: That's psychologist Shira Gabriel.
SHIRA GABRIEL: But what is missed is that humans also have what we call in my lab a need for social embeddedness, which is just a general feeling that we belong to a larger society, that we have a place in it that we fit in.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Gabriel runs the social self lab at the University at Buffalo. She studies what happens when people come together to experience something larger than themselves.
SHIRA GABRIEL: Things like concerts, or festivals, or other large gatherings where people are really focused on a cool event and they're with a bunch of strangers. But you feel sort of a sense of connection while you're together in combination with a sensation of sacredness that the moment has transcended the ordinary day to day. And it's the combination of those two things that we found in my lab lead to the positive effects we find from these collective activities, and we refer to that as “collective effervescence.”
SHUKA KALANTARI: To further study this collective effervescence Gabriel got a bunch of people together in a concert hall and had them sing together.
(Choir singing song begins)
SHIRA GABRIEL: Learning a song and singing a song with thousands of other people, even six months down the road, led people to feel an increased sense of identification with their communities and an increased sense of identification with humanity and an increased feeling that their life had meaning.
(Choir song pauses)
SHUKA KALANTARI: And maybe most importantly, this collective effervescence doesn't just help us.
(Choir song restarts)
SHIRA GABRIEL: When we're in that event and we're singing with strangers and all of us are raising our voices together as one, we're being reminded that we're connected even to people we don't know. And it's that connection and that feeling and that love of humanity generally which leads us to wanna help people who are different from us, leads us to wanna help people who aren't our brothers and sisters or romantic partners or our kids. We're more likely to engage in those pro-social behaviors towards strangers because those strangers are fellow members of our society. They're no longer people who are different or separate from us. They're people who are connected to us.
(Choir song ends)
SHUKA KALANTARI: That's certainly true for Cariello. She says the greatest gift she can offer her son, Nico, is to teach him that to truly experience love, we have to also extend it outward.
ALEXIS CARIELLO: If we are not thinking about the collective, if we're not thinking about how we all make things better for each other, which to me, again, is all about, like, love and liberation, then we've missed an opportunity.
GEENA DAVIS: Love expands our sense of belonging, who belongs to us and who we belong to. It shapes us from infancy through life. And it's wildly diverse, stretching far beyond romantic connections, transcending human relationships. Ultimately, love is about more than just survival. It helps us flourish. It adds meaning to our lives. And while science continues to reveal how love works and how we might nurture more of it, some parts will always remain unknown, because love is an art as much as a science. A mix of chance, chemistry, and experience. An enduring mystery. And isn't that lovely?
I'm Geena Davis. Thank you for exploring these many forms of love with us.
This special is dedicated to the loving memory of radio producer Ben Manila. The Science of Love is a production of The Science of Happiness Podcast at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. Our executive producer and editor, Shuka Kalantari. Our senior producer and co-editor is Kate Parkinson Morgan. Sound Design and Production by Jenny Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Our reporter is Truc Nguyen. Associate Producers are Emily Brower and Tarini Kakkar. Fact-checked by Dr. Eli Susman. Funding for this special was provided by the John Templeton Foundation, as part of the Greater Good Science Center's Spreading Love Through the Media initiative.
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