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Science shows us that love expansive—a biological, cultural, and social phenomena that shapes our lives, and is fundamental for our survival.
The Science of Love is a one hour special examining emerging research on why we love, how love develops, and how it sustains us across many forms of connection. Hosted by award-winning actress, author, and activist Geena Davis, and produced by The Science of Happiness podcast at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, the program features leading researchers in psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology and explores a broad spectrum of love, including romantic partnership, family bonds, friendship, our love for our pets and the natural world, and our sense of collective belonging.
From the families we’re born into, to the relationships we choose, The Science of Love uncovers what happens inside us when love shows up.
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.
Trancription:
[17 seconds] Betty Boop: I wanna be loved by you, just you, nobody else but you. I wanna be loved by you alone, boop boop be doo…
GEENA DAVIS: What is love? For centuries, philosophers, artists and theologians have tried to define it. Scientists are newer to the task. Love is complex, messy and hard to measure, but that hasn't stopped them from trying, and they're beginning to explore just how expansive love can truly be a biological, cultural and social phenomenon. Hi, I'm Geena Davis, and this is The Science of Love by The Science of Happiness podcast and PRX. Over the next three episodes of The Science of Happiness, we'll hear emerging science on why we love, how it develops and how it sustains us across many kinds of relationships, beyond romance, into our friendships, our families and even our non human companions.
The Science of Love after this break.
GEENA DAVIS: Welcome to The Science of Love, a special about the Science of Happiness podcast. I'm Geena Davis. Love isn't simply a feeling. Research suggests it's a core biological drive, essential for both our happiness and our survival. And we know that it shows up in countless ways, like with the love that shapes us from the start.
(SPEAKER 2): The love between a parent and a child is very, very ancient.
GEENA DAVIS: And romantic love.
(SPEAKER 3): I get shaky knees when I'm with this person. I'm scared to say the wrong thing.
GEENA DAVIS: Our friendships.
(SPEAKER 4): One study that tracked people's beliefs about connection and their loneliness over time found that when people thought friendship was something that happened without effort, they were lonelier five years later.
GEENA DAVIS: The deep connection we can feel towards animals, and nature, and the love we feel for our wider communities.
(SPEAKER 5): 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: Over the next hour, we'll travel across the country, from Los Angeles to Bloomington, Indiana, to St. Louis, Missouri, to New York City, to find out how scientists are beginning to uncover answers to age old questions about love. We begin in outer space.
[HEARTBEAT SOUND]
GEENA DAVIS: Can you hear that? The heartbeat. That's the heartbeat of a woman in love. Recorded in 1977, it's part of a collection of sounds and images on a record that NASA affixed on their Voyager space probes. The hope was that if any extraterrestrials came across it, they might be able to decode the message and understand at least a little bit about what life is like on Earth.
ANN DRUYAN: It tells the story of our planet through sounds consisting of world's music, images of life on Earth, greetings in some 59 human languages.
[MAN SPEAKS IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGE]
CHILD’S VOICE: Hello from Children of planet Earth.
ANN DRUYAN: The greetings of the humpback whales and crickets and more.
[ANIMAL CRIES]
GEENA DAVIS: These interstellar messages also included recordings of human biorhythms like brainwaves, the sound of laughter, and a heartbeat. Specifically, Ann Druyan's heartbeat.
ANN DRUYAN: It was my great honor to be the Creative Director of the Voyager Interstellar Message Project.
GEENA DAVIS: Druyan worked on the project with someone whose name you might recognize.
CARL SAGAN: The Cosmos's fool beyond measure of elegant truths of exquisite interrelationships.
GEENA DAVIS: Astronomer Carl Sagan. And over the course of the project, she and Sagan fell deeply in love.
ANN DRUYAN: During the making of the record, when we spoke on the phone long distance, and Carl told me how he felt and I told him how I felt, that felt like a eureka moment! Like Carl and I had made a scientific discovery. And with every heartbeat since, I have to say it was true.
GEENA DAVIS: When it came time to assemble the golden record, Druyan suggested recording a sample of human biorhythms while she meditated on the history of earth, the history of humanity, and the current predicaments that civilization was finding itself in.
Towards the end, her meditation morphed into a personal one. A meditation on love.
ANN DRUYAN: It began with the love that we feel for our children and our children, for their parents and grandparents and guardians, and all the different kinds of love that adults feel. And then, you know, Carl Sagan and I had just fallen madly in love, so I had to confide in the extraterrestrials that I had discovered what that feeling was in its greatest meaning and doubt.
GEENA DAVIS: That recording of Druyan’s heartbeat during her 1977 Love Meditation is still traveling through interstellar space, some 15 billion miles away from Earth.
ANN DRUYAN: It feels amazing. It comforts me. I think about it all the time. For me, love and science are deeply inextricably related. You know, because people think that the dispassion that science requires in the gathering of data and its analysis is the same as being unmoved by it.
But demystifying love does not make it less. The more you know about it, the greater it is.
GEENA DAVIS: Love is etched onto the most distant human made objects in our universe, and it's embedded in our lives everywhere on earth. But why do we love?
SARA ALGOE: We love for survival. From the moment we're born through the rest of our lives, we need other people.
GEENA DAVIS: Social psychologist, Sara Algoe.
SARA ALGOE: For growth, for learning, and for thriving.
DANIEL LEVITIN: Love is intangible.
GEENA DAVIS: Neuroscientist, Daniel Levitin.
DANIEL LEVITIN: It's not logical, it's not limited to things that we can describe in a three or four dimensional universe.
JESSICA EISE: I suppose I could give you an evolutionary theory as to why we love, which is, for group cohesion, because that improves our chances of survival.
GEENA DAVIS: Social and environmental scientist, Jessica Eise.
JESSICA EISE: But that feels so flat in the face of how majestic love is. [Laughs]
ANNA MACHIN: In a way, it's a form of biological bribery.
GEENA DAVIS: Evolutionary anthropologist, Anna Machin.
ANNA MACHIN: Love evolved to make sure the genes carry on down the generations.
GEENA DAVIS: She says the first relationship that we need for survival is the one with our parents and caregivers.
ANNA MACHIN: The love between a parent and a child, particularly a mother and a child, is very, very ancient.
GEENA DAVIS: Machen studies the evolution of love.
ANNA MACHIN: That was probably the first love. We can tell that partly by the fact that a high degree of the activations in maternal love are within the core of the brain and the limbic air of the brain, which is the ancient bit of the brain. And that little set of biological bribery at that point was really to make sure that mums stuck around and looked after what became increasingly a really dependent baby. I mean, human babies are arguably some of the most dependent babies on earth.
GEENA DAVIS: Before children even understand words, parents find ways to connect with them through touch, rhythm, and song. That's in part because when we hear the same music together, our brainwaves can synchronize — both to the music and to each other. Shuka Kalantari reports on how lullabies across cultures help caregivers bond with their babies.
ALEXIS CARIELLO [singing]: I trust you.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Alexis Carello wrote this lullaby for her son, Nico, in the middle of the COVID pandemic. She was pregnant at the time and struggling with severe perinatal depression and anxiety.
ALEXIS CARIELLO: The way that it manifested was very much disconnected from my body, yet I felt prisoner to it at the same time.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Cariello’s therapist connected her with a group at Carnegie Hall who helped expecting parents compose lullabies for their babies. She would hold her belly and sing to him to feel more connected.
ALEXIS CARIELLO [singing]: To hold and be held. I trust you.
ALEXIS CARIELLO: The process allowed me to kind of tap into the love that I was feeling, because up to that point, I had just been feeling anxiety and sort of dread and like wishing time away.
ALEXIS CARIELLO [singing]: For you.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Researchers found that when women with high risk pregnancies spent just 20 minutes a day listening to lullabies and gently holding their bellies, they felt less anxious and more connected to their babies.
DANIEL LEVITIN: It's universal. All mothers instinctively sing to their infants, and they instinctively sing across cultures, songs that have very similar features.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist and musician.
DANIEL LEVITIN: The mother uses a soft voice, not a loud one. She uses small stepwise motion, or occasional leaps but slow tempo. If there's a leap, it always comes down again. (sings) Rockabye, baby, da da, da. I went up, now I'm going down. On the treetop. When the wind blows. Right?
Infants are learning what their mother's voice sounds like, so that in the dark when they can't see one another, the mother can still soothe the infant.
(soft singing)
SHUKA KALANTARI: Researchers at Harvard's Music Lab have collected the sounds of men and women singing lullabies to their babies from all over the world.
(soft singing in different languages)
CONSTANCE BAINBRIDGE: So you'll see the cultures range from like the Arctic Subarctic region, all the way to Polynesia, Central America.
SHUKA KALANTARI: That's Constance Bainbridge. She co-authored a Harvard study looking at how babies respond to lullabies from different cultures and foreign languages.
(male voice singing)
When the babies heard the music, they relaxed, their heart rate slowed and their brain activity calmed regardless of the culture or language the lullabies came from.
CONSTANCE BAINBRIDGE: We also found that age didn't matter for the infants, so whether they were two months old or 14 months old, they had similar relaxation effects. And maybe you would think that with more exposure to music having lived a little bit longer, there might be more of an effect, but the fact that even those really young infants had that similar effect is extra evidence that this might be something innate.
SHUKA KALANTARI: After Cariello’s son was born, she would sing him the lullaby she wrote every single night.
ALEXIS CARIELLO [singing]: I trust you, you know...
SHUKA KALANTARI: Five years later, she's sitting with Nico on the floor of their Brooklyn apartment, playing with toys. He tells me he adores music, and every night before bed, there's only one song he wants to hear. His mom is lullaby, even if it's dark, gentle, soothing, and made with love.
(Cariello sings)
SHUKA KALANTARI: And sometimes Nico sings along.
(Cariello and her son Nico singing together): Remember, you can be tender…
SHUKA KALANTARI: I’m Shuka Kalantari, reporting from Brooklyn, New York.
(Cariello and her son Nico singing together): You can be free.
GEENA DAVIS: Our first love may be our parents, but our first crush can introduce us to a whole new world of feelings and sensations. Butterflies in the stomach every time you see the person, a racing heart, sweaty palms — these intense, often overwhelming feelings have inspired countless songs. That compare romantic love to substance addiction
(Excerpts from “Addicted to Love” by Robert Palmer, “Your Love is My Drug” by Kesha, “Love is the Drug” by Roxy Music, and “Don’t Blame Me” by Taylor Swift play)
GEENA DAVIS: But is it true? Are we really addicted to our lovers?
SANDRA LANGESLAG: This is a pet peeve that I have — they will provide a hypothesis that sounds very plausible. You are addicted to your beloved, and then if they break up with you, you go through withdrawal, and yes, that all sounds very plausible; but we need to actually get the scientific evidence.
GEENA DAVIS: That’s psychologist Sandra Langeslag. Reporter Mandy Nguyen visited her lab at University of Missouri, St. Louis to learn more.
(Langeslag and Nguyen exchange greetings)
MANDY NGUYEN: Inside psychologist Sandra Langeslag’s lab, scientists are doing these experiments to see how love and addiction to a substance compare on a few levels, how they affect our attention, our craving, how pleasant we find them, and how alert they make us feel.
SANDRA LANGESLAG: We're testing participants that are both in love and addicted to something so that we can really, in a single person, see how the two compare.
MANDY NGUYEN: And the addiction of interest here? Vaping! Some research suggests that an addiction to a nicotine vape manifests in the brain similar to stronger drugs like cocaine.
JESSICA: “Do you vape? Are you in love? Are you in a relationship?” And I was like, “Well, check, check. Okay, tell me more!”
MANDY NGUYEN: That's Jessica. She took part in Langeslag’s study and joined us at the lab to demonstrate how the experiment was done.
SANDRA LANGESLAG: So Jessica, you wanna have a seat here, let me get my supplies.
MANDY NGUYEN: Jessica sits in front of a computer and Langeslag brings over a cap for her to put on.
SANDRA LANGESLAG: Slide the cap down. Okay.
MANDY NGUYEN: It's an EEG cap. It sort of looks like a swim cap with a lot of tiny holes in it.
SANDRA LANGESLAG: So here I have the electrodes, I'm gonna click them in each of the holes.
MANDY NGUYEN: Our brains generate electrical signals and the electrodes can pick that up.
SANDRA LANGESLAG: With a millisecond precision, so you can see in real time stuff that's happening in the brain.
MANDY NGUYEN: Once the cap's on, Langeslag sets up a slideshow on the computer. It cycles through pictures of Jessica's husband, strangers vaping, and strangers doing nothing.
SANDRA LANGESLAG: Your task is just to pay attention to the pictures. Okay?
MANDY NGUYEN: When people look at photos of their loved ones or something that reminds them of their addiction, parts of their brain usually snap to attention without them realizing. Langeslag can measure attention by analyzing Jessica's brain signals, seeing what photos she reacts to the quickest, and with the most focus.
SANDRA LANGESLAG: There's always a zillion things going on around us, but we can only focus on a few things at a time.
MANDY NGUYEN: Her participants weren't newly in love. Some were married like Jessica, or lived with their partners for years, and most of them were past this early infatuation stage. So it wouldn't have been surprising if the measures for love came out weaker than for addiction, but that wasn't the case.
SANDRA LANGESLAG: On everything that we measure, people score higher for their beloved than for the vape. And so across the board, love seems even more intense than vaping addiction.
MANDY NGUYEN: Langeslag says it's too early to say if love is actually an addiction. Her study is just one data point. We need more studies looking at other kinds of drugs and testing different measurements, but acknowledging just how intense love can feel is an important first step. I'm Mandy Nguyen, reporting from St. Louis, Missouri.
GEENA DAVIS: What does the scientific literature tell us about the love we feel for our friends, our families, and our four-legged companions? We'll uncover what science tells us after this break.
GEENA DAVIS: Welcome back to “The Science of Love”, a special by the Science of Happiness podcast. I'm Geena Davis.
When we think about love, romance often comes to mind first, but is it the most important?
ANNA MACHIN: There are many forms of love, and there isn't a hierarchy. Romantic love doesn't sit at the top. I'm afraid that's a multi-billion dollar love industry that's told you it does.
GEENA DAVIS: That's anthropologist Anna Machin again.
ANNA MACHIN: We now know that the relationships you build, the love that you have in your life, whatever form of love it might be, is the biggest factor in your mental and physical health, your longevity and your wellbeing. There is an enormous body of evidence behind that now.
GEENA DAVIS: One of the most important kinds of relationships is friendship. The people in your life who are your ride or die. The Thelma to your Louise.
[Audio from Thelma and Louise: “Let's keep going.” “You sure?” “Yeah.”]
GEENA DAVIS: Shuka Kalantari reports from Berkeley, California, about how some researchers are looking to a surprising source to learn more about the neuroscience of platonic love.
SHUKA KALANTARI: It's Sunday morning, and Annaliese Beery is kneeling over some bushes in her backyard, holding a metal bin filled with Cheerios, a hay-like filling, and two small animals huddled in a corner.
ANNALIESE BEERY: So, I'm just gonna pick up this little girl and show you what a vole looks like.
SHUKA KALANTARI: A California prairie vole.
ANNALIESE BEERY: Voles are small, brown. They're a little larger than most tiny mice. They have short tails and their ears tend to lie flat against their head. So if it looks like a little brown, nondescript rodent, there's a chance it’s a vole.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Beery runs the Beery lab at UC Berkeley, where she studies voles.
ANNALIESE BEERY: So voles are very unusual because they form selective social bonds with one another, and prairie voles form bonds with their mates. They're socially monogamous. And so, social monogamy means you're forming a bond with a romantic partner regardless of what's happening with a few extra flings on the side.
SHUKA KALANTARI: So you're saying the voles sleep around?
ANNALIESE BEERY: Yeah. [Laughs]
SHUKA KALANTARI: Decades of research have turned prairie voles into a one of a kind model for exploring the social brain.
[3 knocks]
ANNALIESE BEERY: Come on in! Hello!
SHUKA KALANTARI: Inside Beery’s lab, there's a definite vibe. A T-shirt is pinned to a wall with a cartoon of three voles hugging. One is drinking a beer. There are vole paintings and stuffies, and a drawing of a vole with bubble letters saying, “Where's the apple sauce?”
ANNALIESE BEERY: They love applesauce. We use applesauce as a reward for them sometimes.
SHUKA KALANTARI: But what makes the lab unique isn't the quirky decor — it's that unlike most labs focused on vole romance, Beery’s focuses on the neurobiology of friendship.
ANNALIESE BEERY: In our lab, we do a lot to say, “How are romantic or mate-related bonds different from peer or friendship-related bonds?” And that's a question we're really interested in.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Beery’s lab recently took a closer look at oxytocin in the brain. You know, what people call the “love hormone”?
ANNALIESE BEERY: Oxytocin does get called the “love hormone” and the “cuddle hormone” a lot in the news, and I think where we go a little bit astray is that no neurochemical, really, has a single function.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Oxytocin can spike during things like sex, kissing, childbirth, and during less-cuddly times as a response to stress. Lab studies show voles can bond romantically without it, but it takes longer. Beery wanted to see if the same goes for friendships. She worked with genetically modified prairie voles that lacked a key oxytocin receptor, so their bodies couldn't produce the hormone. Then, they put those voles in little rooms together.
ANNALIESE BEERY: Prairie voles were very slow to form new relationships. They took much longer than it normally takes, and then those relationships were more fragile.
SHUKA KALANTARI: In another experiment, her team put the oxytocin-free voles in a sort of maze with multiple rooms that were all connected by tubes.
ANNALIESE BEERY: I think of this as the party format study, where if you go to a party with a friend, and you're bonded to that friend, and you're a little socially nervous, you might stick to that friend for a while before you start to branch out.
SHUKA KALANTARI: That's normally the case with voles — and humans!
ANNALIESE BEERY: But the voles that were missing their oxytocin receptors, you couldn't even tell that they had come with a partner. They immediately mixed. So it really seems to be important for that new phase of a relationship and forming a relationship. I always tend to come at things from a wonder of science, basic science angle. But all of this research has a really big potential applicability to understanding humans.
SHUKA KALANTARI: And human conditions like autism and schizophrenia, which can make it harder for people to connect.
ANNALIESE BEERY: Nearly every different social disorder or diagnosis that has a social component impacts these peer relationships. Many people have said we have an isolation epidemic — so understanding not only what neurochemicals, but what sorts of environmental circumstances play a role.
SHUKA KALANTARI: She thinks friendships are especially important to study because they're the core of our relationships.
ANNALIESE BEERY: Maybe peer relationships are more common than monogamy, and provide a foundation from which monogamy has repeatedly evolved. And wouldn't it be interesting to find out that many more species show these sort of peer relationships, these friendship-like relationships?
SHUKA KALANTARI: I’m Shuka Kalantari, reporting from UC Berkeley.
[You’ve Got A Friend by Carole King]
GEENA DAVIS: Back in the human world of shifting emotions, heartbreaks and connections, friendships can be even more complex and sometimes unattended to.
MARISA G. FRANCO: We just treat friendship as something that we take for granted. Something that's nice to have, but not necessary. Something that we don't have to put effort into. Something that, you know, people are less likely to work through conflict with friends than romantic partners. And we have this all wrong!
GEENA DAVIS: That's Marisa G. Franco, a psychologist and expert on the science of friendship. She says our romantic relationships can often take a hit when we don't have friends beyond our partners.
MARISA G. FRANCO: Fundamentally, you know, one person can't fulfill us — as much as that's the myth we've been told, that one person can complete us.
GEENA DAVIS: Research shows that when we don't have friends, or when the friendships we do have are unhealthy, we're twice as likely to die prematurely. A risk even greater than smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
MARISA G. FRANCO: And so even when we have a romantic partner we really love, likely, a lot of us still struggle with feelings of loneliness because our fundamental human needs are not met through one person.
GEENA DAVIS: Friendships can not only make us less depressed, but they spill over and contribute to our spouses feeling less depressed, too.
MARISA G. FRANCO: And our romantic relationships thrive the most when we consider our romantic partners our friends. It's friendship that is at the center of the success of romantic partnerships.
GEENA DAVIS: We need friendships to thrive, but how do we make friends? What does the research say?
MARISA G. FRANCO: There was a study where people were told that they would go into a group and be liked based off of personality questionnaires they filled out. This was a lie, the researchers were using deception. But when they thought they would be liked, they suddenly became friendlier and warmer and more open. And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy where people that assume they're liked get liked, because assuming you’re like triggers these friendly behaviors.
GEENA DAVIS: And friendships don't always just happen. You need to make an effort.
MARISA G. FRANCO: One study that tracked people's beliefs about connection and their loneliness over time found that when people thought friendship was something that happened without effort, they were lonelier five years later; whereas the people that thought friendship takes effort were less lonely five years later. Because they made that effort!
GEENA DAVIS: Another relationship where we often have to put in effort is with our families, and those dynamics can be tricky.
BELINDA CAMPOS: Everybody values family. There's no doubt about it, that's a human thing. But we have different ideas about how to show our value for family.
GEENA DAVIS: Belinda Campos is a psychologist at UC Irvine, where she studies the effects of familism, or familial love.
BELINDA CAMPOS: Those of us who report greater endorsement of this more interdependent way of being actually report favorable responses in terms of their bodily response, their stress hormone response.
GEENA DAVIS: She says Western cultures often see familism as something that holds us back.
BELINDA CAMPOS: Something that had to be changed in order to do well in the United States.
GEENA DAVIS: But Campos’s studies have shown the opposite. That familial love is not a deficit, but an advantage.
BELINDA CAMPOS: When you grow up around these ideals about family and closeness, those ideas translate into socialization practices. How we learn to share, how we learn to put others before the self, how we learn to manage our relationships — that ends up being really good for our relationships. Not just in our families, but outside, to our romantic partners, to our friends, and other kinds of relationships.
GEENA DAVIS: We've been talking about love as something expansive, woven into our relationships with partners, friends, family, and our physiology. But love doesn't stop with other people. For many of us, it extends into the rest of the animal kingdom. After all, a lot of us don't just have pets. We consider them family.
[Puppy Love (Remix) by Paul Anka]
GEENA DAVIS: An estimated 60 million households in the US include a dog. Research shows that could be great for our health. Just petting a dog can lower cortisol, the stress hormone, and spending time with them can make us more cooperative, friendly, active, and more attentive to the people around us.
TRUC NGUYEN: I love my dog, Frankie, and I feel like he loves me too.
GEENA DAVIS: That’s reporter Truc Nguyen.
TRUC NGUYEN: Frankie definitely feels like he's a part of my family.
[Dog whining]
TRUC NGUYEN: Are you so happy to see that? You're so happy. (Laughs) He loses his mind when he sees my friends.
GEENA DAVIS: Most studies on loving dogs have focused on how we feel about them, how they help us. But what about how they feel? Do they pick up on our social cues, like who we trust, who we like, and use that information to make their own decisions? To find out, we put Frankie and Nguyen on their first airplane ride together to do an experiment at a canine laboratory, and learn about how our dogs understand the world through us.
[Airplane departure audio]
ZACH SILVER: Just turn left here. We're gonna head right down the stairs. This way, Frankie!
TRUC NGUYEN: That's Zach Silver. He founded the Canine Intelligence Lab here at Occidental College. Frankie and I are here to take part in what his team calls an “affiliation study.”
ZACH SILVER: We're curious if Frankie is, sort of, seeing the world through your eyes here.
TRUC NGUYEN: They wanna know, will Frankie pick up on my social preferences? And will he use that information to make decisions?
ZACH SILVER: Like, “Well, my primary point of contact in the world, this person I spend the most time with, seems to be friends with one person. Should I be friends with that person too?”
UNKNOWN (LAB ASSISTANT): Hello.
TRUC NGUYEN: Hi!
ZACH SILVER: Gonna step on into this room right here. Okay. Come on in.
TRUC NGUYEN: Frankie waits outside the room as I head into the lab with Silver and his two student researchers, Eliza and Fiona.
ZACH SILVER: So Fiona will turn towards you and offer to give a hug.
FIONA: So, I'll initiate by turning towards you, like this.
TRUC NGUYEN: But instead of opening my arms to hug her, I hold them straight up in the air.
ZACH SILVER: Then Eliza's gonna turn towards you, ask for a hug, and you are going to give Eliza a hug. And the idea here is, we're communicating to Frankie that there is an affiliation between you and Eliza. So, we're basically trying to convince Frankie that this is your friend.
TRUC NGUYEN: After a few practice rounds, we're ready for Frankie.
ZACH SILVER: Alright, Frankie. Alright!
TRUC NGUYEN: I wait for Fiona's cue, and put my arms up in the air. When Eliza turns towards me, we hug. We do this choreography three times while Silver holds onto Frankie. Then I turn towards the wall.
[Unzipping sounds]
TRUC NGUYEN: Fiona and Eliza sit on the ground, open their pouches, and hold out dog treats in their hands. Frankie is released. First, he runs up to me, but I have to ignore him, so he pauses at my ankles. When Frankie realizes I'm not going to turn towards him, he walks over to Eliza, who I just hugged three times. He takes a treat from her hand, but ignores Fiona. Each time, Frankie leaves the room and comes back in.
ZACH SILVER: Frankie's doing a great job so far. Come on Frankie!
TRUC NGUYEN: After rejecting, giving hugs, and eating treats, the experiment is done.
ZACH SILVER: Alright, good job, Frankie!
TRUC NGUYEN: Silver gives us the results. What you saw today, what does it tell you about my relationship with Frankie?
ZACH SILVER: Well, it certainly suggests that there's a strong relationship here — that Frankie is using his perception of your other relationships to decide how he wants to form those new ones. So, if Frankie didn't care at all about you, he wouldn't care about who you like and don't like either. Even after being released and being able to make choices, Frankie came to you first all four times, only then detoured off to one of the other two people.
TRUC NGUYEN: Like dogs, we also take cues from people we care about to make decisions, and choose who's in and who's out.
ZACH SILVER: We take shortcuts, and one shortcut that we take is that we use people that we already know and already have a strong opinion of to help us make those future decisions.
TRUC NGUYEN: Whether we're talking about people or dogs, the more we try to understand the beings we love, the better.
ZACH SILVER: We could survive without dogs, and dogs could survive without us, but together, we're able to accomplish much more. That's what feels like love to me.
TRUC NGUYEN: I'm Truc Nguyen, reporting from Los Angeles.
ZACH SILVER: All right. Who's counting us down? You are.
LAB ASSISTANT: You are.
[COLLECTIVELY]: 1, 2, 3. Frankie!
ZACH SILVER: Thanks so much for coming. Frankie, it was so nice to meet you. Hope you enjoyed the science.
GEENA DAVIS: We've been exploring research on the love between partners, friends, families, even our dogs. After the break, we turn to the science of love for the natural world — how love transforms during grief, and how it expands to our larger communities.
I am Geena Davis. Stay with us.
GEENA DAVIS: This is The Science of Love, a special by The Science of Happiness Podcast. I'm Geena Davis. 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. Celidwen is from the Nahua and Mayan lineages, born and raised in the highlands of Chiapas in Mexico.
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.
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.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Remember Cariello? She wrote a lullaby for Nico five years ago 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 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.
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.
This special is dedicated to the loving memory of radio producer Ben Manila. Special thanks to Madeline Di Nonno, President and CEO of the Geena Davis Institute, producer Jess Jupiter and Dacher Keltner, host of the Science of Happiness and Faculty Director of the Greater Good Science Center. Also, thanks to Jason Marsh, the Center's executive director, Nicole Churchill-Yip, operations and events coordinator and Hong Nguyen, Operations Director.
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.
Learn more about the Science of Happiness Podcast and the Greater Good Science Center at greatergood.berkeley.edu/podcasts. The Science of Love and the Science of Happiness is distributed by PRX.
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