Arthur Aron
speaker
91 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Arthur Aron’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thank you.
Well, we were looking for people, we were looking for couples that were very intensely in love. These were people who'd been married on the average for 20 years. And we basically just asked various people we knew, that my collaborators knew, and my then-graduate student, Bianca Acevedo, who's now a professor. She interviewed them just to see that they really meant it.
And sure enough, we were able to find, you know, plenty.
Well, we just basically asked them, they would sit together and we'd ask them to describe, you know, what's going on in their relationship. You know, these were all people who said they were very intensely in love. And we asked them, what does that mean and how does that work?
And Bianca, my favorite story is Bianca told me that one couple said, we always annoy our friends because we're always all over each other physically. So while they're talking, they're touching each other and doing things like that.
Well, we were. In fact, that's why we did the study. So we put them in the scanner to look at what their brains look like, you know, what areas become active when they look at pictures of their partner. We'd done many earlier studies of people who'd just fallen in love, and the key finding was known as the dopamine reward area that would
pick up when they looked at a picture of their partner versus a neutral friend. And we found that these people showed the same thing. They showed that activation of the dopamine reward area.
Well, it's an acquaintance that is of the same gender as their partner, as attractive as their partner. We test for all of that, and they look at the two pictures. I mean, they alternate the two, and we're looking at what goes on in their brain when they're looking at that one. This is exactly what we did in the initial study of people who'd just fallen in love.
We find that strong dopamine reward area. One other thing that we didn't find in the long term, we find an indication of anxiety, tension. You know, if you've just fallen in love with someone, you're likely to worry, are they going to leave me? Are some going to happen to them? Whereas if you've been with someone for 20 years, you don't worry about that as much.
Well, there's another area of the brain that has been found mostly in animals where they've got a lifelong bond, attachment bond. And we saw that also in the long-term couples. I mean, it's kind of natural if you've been together a while and your things are going well to have that kind of common security.
Well, overall, there's lots of research showing that relationships tend to decline over time. After 10 years, half of them, at least in the U.S., are divorced, or close to half. And overall, not for everybody, but they tend to decline. And so that seems to be what we think is the standard.
Yeah. When we did a U.S. nationally representative survey, we found that of people married 10 years or longer, 40% claim to be very intensely in love. Now, that means only 20% of those that got married that are still together. But still, that's more than we expected.
Well, there is findings, not from my lab, but from others, showing that one of the ways couples often feel good about themselves is by comparing to other couples. You know, you leave a party and say, oh, those people always argue. You know, we don't do that as much. But so it's kind of hard to then be told that, no, some people have really passionate relationships.
If you don't, as most people don't, it could be a little annoying. On the other hand, it's a reminder that maybe you could do something. We shouldn't just assume that there's nothing we can do. We should look for some way to make it more like that and not just go along with how things are.
Yeah. What we did is we went to a part of Vancouver that has a very large bridge way over a river that wobbles. And so when you walk over it, it's a little scary. You could easily fall off. And so we had an attractive woman, young woman standing on the bridge. And when men of appropriate age by himself would walk across, she would stop and say, could I ask you a few questions? I'm a researcher.
And she asked some questions and showed him a little thing where he would write, make a little picture of something. And we said, thank you very much. And if you want to know more about it, you can phone me. And she'd give him the phone number. We also had her stop an equal number of men on a very safe nearby bridge.
What we found is that on the shaky bridge, the things, the pictures they wrote or the comments they made were much more, had much more romantic and sexual content, and they were much more likely to phone her. So that was the finding. And we've done follow-up studies too.
And the logic is that if you're shaken up and you're not entirely sure of why, and you meet someone who's attractive, you're likely to think, oh, that's why I'm feeling this. And it turns out that in some other studies done later, it's been replicated many times in various ways.
They found that if you're, you know, if you're sort of worked up and you meet someone who's unattractive, you're likely to feel strongly disgusted. In other words, you retake the emotion, the arousal you've gotten, you reinterpret it.
Yeah. You have to be a little careful. I can tell you a little story. Some years after we did this study, I ran into a student who attended one of my classes. And he said, oh, Dr. Aaron, I just wanted to tell you what happened recently. I was in India recently. And I met at his hotel this attractive young woman, and I thought, oh, I know his research.
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