Abstract
Women often complain that their partners are not romantic enough. This raises the question: how romance is recognized and evaluated in a love relationship? However, there has been essentially no empirical research bearing on this issue. The present set of studies examined possible gender differences in perceptions of romance and the associated neural mechanisms in Chinese college students. In Study 1, 303 participants (198 women, 105 men) were administrated a questionnaire consisting of 60 sentences and required to rate the romance level of each sentence. Results showed higher rating scores in males than females for low romance items, but not for high or medium romance items. In Study 2, 69 participants (37 women, 32 men) were recruited to judge the degree of romance in sentences presented on a computer screen one by one. Compared with females, males again showed higher scores and responded more slowly only to low romance items. In Study 3, 36 participants (18 women, 18 men) currently in love with someone were scanned with functional MRI while they did the romance judgment task from Study 2. Compared with females, greater brain activation was found for males in the frontal lobe, precentral gyrus, precuneus and parahippocampal gyrus for low romance items. The results provide the first piece of evidence for gender differences in romance perception, suggesting enhanced cognitive processing in males when evaluating the degree of romance in romantic scenes.
Highlights
Love is generally regarded as one of the deepest and most meaningful sentiments
A 263 analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed a main effect for romance level (F(2,68) = 89.05, p,0.001)
All pairwise comparisons were significant with response to the low romance items (M = 2377 ms, SD = 304) vs. medium romance items (M = 2098 ms, SD = 281), and medium romance items vs. high romance items (M = 1939 ms, SD = 289)
Summary
Love is generally regarded as one of the deepest and most meaningful sentiments. The study of love has a long history, starting several decades ago. Rubin had done research on the measurement of love versus liking [1]. Among the various types of love, romantic love is said to have inspired some of the greatest achievements of mankind and is considered a culturally universal and powerful experience that affects many aspects of human life [2], [3]. Romantic love is highly correlated with relationship satisfaction, relationship quality and stability [4], [5], and is often a prerequisite for marriage [6]. Directed towards a single person, it is a complex sentiment involving cognitive, emotional, behavioral and erotic components that may vary on the basis of gender [7], [8]
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